


Magus Rex

by Toastybluetwo



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-10-06
Updated: 2011-10-05
Packaged: 2017-10-24 08:35:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 12
Words: 38,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/261304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toastybluetwo/pseuds/Toastybluetwo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, and we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.” – William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act IV scene 3.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for Dragon Age: Legacy.

The room was in a cheap and seedy tavern in Cumberland. The proprietors hadn’t bothered to purchase a proper bed for the musty straw mattress that someone had tossed into a corner, nor did they clean the chamber pot or the wash basin after the last occupant had used it. In the room next to ours, I heard the baritone moans and pleasured mumbles of a man with a thick Antivan accent.

“This is nice,” I said, trying my best to smile as I took two steps into the room, which amounted to crossing it. Resting my filthy, chapped fingers on the window pane for a moment, I pushed upward on the damp wooden latch. The window opened with a creak, the scent and sounds of the street drowning those from inside of the tavern.

“Don’t touch the mattress.” Anders locked the door behind us, placed the key in one of his pockets, and stretched his hands out toward the mattress. He mumbled what sounded like a modified lightning spell, and suddenly the mattress jumped. The hair on my arms prickled as it stood for a moment, the scent of burning straw reaching my nostrils.

I raised my eyebrows at him. “Killing the lice?”

“Exactly.” He offered me a small smile. “I did live in the Undercity for six years, you know. Though…if you’re going to take a nap, I’d recommend not laying on the mattress for a bit. At least until we’re sure that it’s not going to catch on fire.”

“Oddly enough, I’d intended to sleep in a corner.” I sat on the floor, stretched out my legs, and began to unlace my boots. I tried my best not to think about how long it had been since I had a bath, or even washed in a washbasin that did not look as though someone had been sick in it just before. As I remover my right boot, though, I winced at the smell.

Silence fell between us, and the air in the room became weighty. Uneasy. This was a regular occurrence between the two of us, and had been so since the events that had driven us from Kirkwall. In the two months since we fled, we at first did not speak to one another at all. We had occupied ourselves instead with conversation among our companions instead, and Varric was always willing to fill any silence that dared come between the four of us. Then, he decided to head off for Orlais, saying that he would make a quick fortune off of tawdry romances that he could pen in under a day, and would find us wherever we travelled.

With Varric gone, Carver and Anders began to quarrel on a regular basis, and I had trouble gaining any willingness to quell their battles. I found myself sleeping next to my own brother rather than the man I had shared a bed with for three years. In the middle of one of these nights, camped on the edge of a swamp so thick with flies that none of us could sleep comfortably, Carver told me that he planned to subdue Anders, take him to the nearest port, and deliver him personally to the Warden-Commander in Vigil’s Keep.

“He killed an entire party of Grey Wardens,” Carver whispered to me, his soft voice edged with desperation. “The Warden-Commander wants answers. Don’t you see? The Grey Wardens were his last refuge, and he gave it away – willingly. The Warden-Commander is also the Queen of Ferelden. She can’t afford to have one of her own Wardens causing unrest in places that Ferelden has ties with.”

I rolled over and looked at him. For a moment, I caught a hint of fear in his face, before he reached out, squeezing one of my shoulders.

Carver continued, “Ask yourself if this is what Mother would want. Ask yourself if this is the right thing to do.”

The grip on my shoulder grew uncomfortable, and I knew that my face showed it. I started to speak, but hesitated. I couldn’t find the words for what I wanted to say.

“I’ve seen the two of you,” whispered Carver, his eyes narrowing. “You are still very upset with him about what happened with the Chantry. You hardly speak to him. Come with me to Vigil’s Keep. The respect and influence that you gathered in Kirkwall is well known even in Ferelden. You can start over, but this time, not at the bottom. The King won’t let you starve. He knows that you are a first-hand witness to critical political events. He needs that information.” The hand on my shoulder moved, gripping one of mine. “Please, Sister. You never took any of my advice before. Listen to me for just this once. You don’t need Anders. He is rushing down the path to his own death. He has sacrificed the lives of countless innocent people. It is just a matter of time before he does the same to you.”

Silence fell between us. The flies kept buzzing, but they seemed to respectfully give the two of us a wide berth.

The words that fell from my lips came without comfort even as I said them: “I don’t know why I’m still with him. Nothing is simple, Carver. You know that. I’m not sure how I feel about him.”

I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, and immediately my heart sank into my stomach before I even turned to look in that particular direction. I knew that we had been caught, and caught so thoroughly that there was no explaining our way out of it. Anders stood in front of the campfire, his coat and waistcoat missing, his hair loose and tousled from sleep. He looked angry. I knew the look – eyebrows together, eyes narrowed, hints of red in his pale cheeks. “Well, isn’t this awkward?” He murmured.

I stood up, almost stumbling with the effort. I didn’t know what to say. I only watched as his expression shifted from anger to hurt as he looked back at me.

“You thought that nothing changed between you and my sister after all that you’ve done? How naive.” Carver said in a dry voice. He leaned backward, resting his hands on the ground, which at first looked like an incredibly awkward position, until I saw his fingers slide under the cloak that he had been laying upon. I caught a brief flash of metal in the moonlight.

“Carver,” I said in a low voice, “be quiet. You are not helping.”

“Leaving me, Marian?” Anders’ voice remained quiet, but his gaze filled with almost palatable hurt. “Running off in the middle of the night? After all that we’ve been through and all of the promises that we made? We had a life together. We were happy once.” He extended a hand toward me, palm up. His fingers stretched out, as if he yearned to take my hand.

“You were never happy,” I murmured. “You can’t be happy. Justice won’t let you. He took it all away from you.” Oh, Maker, how I wanted to take the hand offered to me. I knew that this wouldn’t be easy. I also knew that I couldn’t leave him, no matter what he had done. I didn’t even have to consider the situation further.

“Please,” Anders said, his gaze like iron on my face. “I ask you to reconsider whatever thoughts you might be having about leaving. You have every right to be angry at me. I lied to you. I did things, terrible things.” He still held out his hand, though his fingers had begun to tremble. “You are an intricate part of my world. I would be fractured without you, Marian. At least give me the chance to win back your trust.” The desperation was thick in his voice.

It was then that I realized that, of course, I did not need him, but that he needed _me._

I saw a flash of steel, and the world jerked into quick motion. I saw Carver leap at Anders just as Anders grabbed my arm, dragging me away from the campfire. I stumbled, jerked my arm away from his grasp, pivoted on my heels, and threw the first spell that came to mind directly at Carver. A force spell grazed his head on the left side, collided with a tree, and burst into a shower of splinters.

Carver let out a groan, staggered backwards, and pointed his sword directly at Anders whom, in the confusion, had also managed to arm himself. Anders now held his staff aloft, and stood in a defensive position.

“I’m taking you into custody, Anders,” Carver cried out, the fingers of his left hand reaching up to touch the small stream of blood trickling down his neck. “Hand over your staff and come with me to the Warden-Commander.”

“Carver, you cannot win this.” Anders said in a very patient voice. His gaze darted toward me for a brief moment, but only for a second, before returning to Carver’s face. “I don’t want to harm you.”

“Who’s to say that I won’t execute you myself?” snarled Carver, his bloodstained hand trembling. “Who’s to say who will harm who?”

“Mm.” Anders used his staff to point as he spoke, drawing the tip in the air between his body and Carver’s. “Stunning spell to the head. Trip the legs with a staff sweep, pivot, turn, cast sleep spell as you fall to the ground…unconscious. You won’t even have a chance to touch me.” Lowering the tip of his staff, Anders tilted his head in my direction. “That is taking into consideration that your sister won’t want to incapacitate you herself, though I wouldn’t place the odds at one hundred percent, as she doesn’t seem to be exactly on my side, either. In both cases, you will wake up with a nasty rash from the flies in this marsh, and by then, either I will be gone alone, or your sister will be with me.” He held the staff lightly in both hands, fingers relaxed around the polished wood. “I have a better plan. You go to Vigil’s Keep and tell Her Highness that you were unable to apprehend me, but you know from my discussions with Marian that we’ve decided to head for Tantervale. We’re going to buy a home there, marry, adopt several adorable kittens, plant a daisy garden, and live out the rest of our days as outlaw apostates on the lam.”

“You expect me to lie to the Warden-Commander? For you?” Carver asked, rage coloring his cheeks and filling his voice.

“How would you know that it was a lie?” Anders replied, his own posture relaxing. “We’ve gone two weeks out of the way, but we could easily double back and take the back trails toward the north.”

My decision had been made before Carver even told me of his plan. Only then did I have a chance to vocalize it. “Carver, you should go. I’ll…I’ll find a way to contact you when I can. I promise.”

Carver turned to me, and immediately saw that he was not the least bit surprised by what I had just said. “Thinking of your family last? Again? It doesn’t surprise me,” he said, his upper lip curling in disgust.

I felt Anders’ hand on my shoulder, gentle and warm. This time, I did not pull away from his grasp. “I am a part of her family, Carver,” he said. I was astonished that in all of this that he had remained so very calm, that he had not taken on the power of Vengeance and killed my brother on the spot. It seemed unlike him. “A family does not always mean that the people inside of it are bound by blood.”

Carver slid his sword into its sheath, held up his hands in a gesture of submission, and began to slowly back away from the two of us. “Anders, I will kill you. Not today, but I will. I don’t care what you are or what you say. Mark my words: if my sister dies by your hands, expect my sword in your back that very day.”

The grip on my shoulder tightened. “I’m losing my patience, and you’re wasting time.” Anders’ voice began to edge in a direction that I dreaded. I recognized the depth of the pitch, the twisting of the vowels ever so slightly. Vengeance was restless.

“Anders,” I said softly. “Don’t.”

I did not turn to look at Anders. I didn’t need to. Whatever he looked like - whether his eyes had begun to glow or if he just merely began to appear unhinged – something made Carver take up his cloak quickly, turn, and head off toward the south. He moved through a thick stand of trees, vanishing at last from our view.

I fixed my gaze on those trees, illuminated as willowy, green forms in the bright moonlight. As I drew a deep breath of the thick marsh air, I felt my body at last respond to the exhaustion that had long settled upon my mind. My knees wavered, yet I refused to give in to rest. Not yet.

One of Anders’ hands rested on my hip with a gentle touch, and I closed my eyes. I wanted to pretend that the events in Kirkwall never happened. I wanted to turn to him, to let him take me to bed, so that we could sleep in one another’s arms for as long as the sun would allow.

“There’s still time,” Anders whispered. “You can still catch up with him.”

I think he knew that I wasn’t going to leave at this point. I heard a whimper catch in his throat as he drew me close to him, and I stood there, in his arms at last, uncomfortable by the heat of his body and the humidity of the swamp surrounding us. For a moment, I wondered if I should follow Carver – not so much out of a betrayal of the man that I did indeed love, but in the fact that Carver was my brother. I had protected him when I was a small girl who did not like to wear shoes, who had begun to assume that I must have been born with muddy feet and filthy hands, and he was but a boy with ruddy cheeks and skinned knees.

No, I could not follow Carver. I could not follow where he felt driven to go.

“Let’s go to bed.” I knew that my voice sounded resigned even as I spoke. This was difficult, but I had become accustomed to difficult. I didn’t want to think anymore – not that night, and not about a future that seemed to be pressing in on me, all around me, like the heat of the swamp that surrounded us.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there are several revelations.

I woke in the seedy inn in Cumberland, seated on the floor, leaning with my head against one of the bare wooden walls. My boots and stockings lay in a heap next to my pale, bare feet. The deep shadows and lack of light in the room told me that I had been asleep for some time, and as I moved my head, my neck protested my choice of sleeping, sitting up, in a corner of a room rather than on the stained mattress.

Within arm’s reach, a number of burlap bags formed a somewhat awkward, short pyramid. The scent of food came from somewhere in the pile – fresh bread, and some kind of fruit. My stomach growled. I had not eaten at all that day, and now I could thing of nothing else but a fresh apple in my hand, or a pear’s skin crunching as it melted in my mouth. I leaned forward, taking up ends of the rope that held closed the top parcel.

“You’re awake.” When Anders spoke at last, his voice sounded soft, yet strained. “I didn’t want to wake you. You needed your rest.”

I raised my head and looked at him. He stood at the window, staring out at the street beneath us. His hair, unbound and uncombed, fell close to his face, obscuring his face from my view.

The terrible events of Anders’ past had left him prone to bouts of serious melancholy, some of them lasting for weeks. I was used to this, and tried my best to offer him whatever he needed to keep such moods from growing severe, be it an ear to listen, time by himself, or even a pair of arms to hold him close to my body as he wept, without excuse or reason, for long periods of time.

This time, however, something seemed different. Something was truly wrong. Despite the open window, the air in the room felt thick, heavy, and smelled like the Undercity of Kirkwall – a combination of death, despair, and the flow from an open sewer.

“The Maker, indeed, has a sense of humor.” Anders clenched his hands into fists, and took a few quick, shallow breaths before speaking again. “The entire world has gone mad at the worst time. I had plans - such great plans that would set the revolution into motion. But, what I have heard, what I have seen…” he trailed off, a soft noise of frustration escaping his lips. He was fighting himself, trying not to slip away, trying not to lose control.

I rose to my feet and crossed the room to him as quickly as I could. “What happened? What did you see?” I grabbed his arm, squeezing it. “Look at me, Anders. Look at me. You have to keep fighting.” The words tumbled from my lips, desperate and hasty. Giving his arm a good, hard yank, I turned him toward me.

His eyes, bloodshot and swollen, met mine. Fortunately, they did not have a blue glow to them. Yet. “Something has happened that I cannot ignore,” he said, his voice breaking as he spoke. He had been crying. “You must leave me. Go to Ferelden, as your brother suggested. Go to Vigil’s Keep. If I survive what I must do, then Maker help me, I will find you again.”

I shook my head. “You’re not getting away this easily and with such little information. Not now, not again. I won’t let you.” My fingers dug into his arm. “If you’re attempting some sort of half-planned suicide mission, at least have the decency to share it with me. I deserve that.” My heart began to pound hard in my chest. “No more lies, Anders!”

Defeated, he sunk onto the edge of the mattress, avoiding my eyes as he stared at the wall behind me. His hands dropped helplessly into his lap.

“Frederick,” he said in a soft voice.

I blinked hard, my right hand still hanging in the air where his arm had once been, the fingers still curled. “What?”

“Frederick. My name is Frederick.” His voice sounded strange as he spoke, but for once, I doubted that it was due to the influence of whatever creature lived inside of him. “I ran away from the Circle in the Anderfels when I was thirteen. I was captured in the Imperium a year later and ransomed to First Enchanter Irving, who was visiting the Imperium at the time. It was decided that it would be better off if I stayed in Ferelden.” His gaze fell to his hands, which he curled into fists, then released, as if to test the strength of his fingers. “I could barely speak the dialect spoken in Ferelden, and there were only two of us from the Anderfels at the Circle there – myself and Karl.”

“You knew him from the Ferelden Circle then,” I murmured softly, allowing my hand to drop as I sat on the mattress next to him.

“Karl would translate for me when he could, and he worked with me to speak the language better, but he was a full member of the Circle, while I was just a boy,” Anders continued. “I was only an initiate. I had to communicate with others my age, which, I have to admit, forced me to learn the language in a matter of a few years.” His face darkened again. “When the others couldn’t mock my speaking, they mocked the way that I spoke. So, I worked to say words as they did. An accent is very, very easy to get rid of when one is concentrating hard enough on their own speech. They used to call me Anders. The name stuck, and Irving approved of it – not because he approved of their name-calling and teasing, but because he didn’t want to encourage any worldly-wise mages to put two and two together and realize who I really was.”

“And who are you?” I knew that this was a question I could not answer myself. Not in the slightest. I had known the man for almost ten years, taken meals with him, slept next to him and with him for over three of those years, and suddenly, I felt as though I didn’t know him at all. “Frederick?”

“Frederick von Reiniger.” Anders turned to face me at last. “That is my name, and I’ve wanted to tell it to you for years, but I could not risk complicating the situation in Kirkwall. If something had happened, if the Viscount had learned who I was, or worse, the Knight-Commander…I would have created a situation with far greater magnitude than the destruction of the Chantry. Yes. That is possible, and may still be.”

“’Von Reiniger’. That family name sounds familiar, but I can’t place it.” I looked away from his face for a moment, my thoughts moving through the names of the many nobles that I had met over the years. I did not remember any nobles from the Anderfels with that name, but perhaps my memory was faulty. Then, I stopped myself. Why was there need to think on nobles at all? I looked back at Anders – Frederick – whoever he was. “You’re a farmer’s son. You told me so. You and I came from the same sort of beginnings. Why –“

Anders began to laugh again, the peals twisting with anguish. “It was a brilliant story, wasn’t it? It seems that Fereldens fall for it the best. You assume that because I burned down a barn that my father was a farmer. Very few of you have ever visited the Hossberg Valley. You’ve never witnessed the fact that all of the high-ranking families live there because that is the only place with farmable land in the entire country.”

“So, are you about to tell me that you’re the son of the king?” I asked without considering the words first. In truth, I felt my nerves beginning to fray. It had taken too many years for us to have this discussion, too much had happened, and Anders was making the greatest effort of telling me everything he ever wanted to say in such a roundabout way that I had nearly lost track of the discussion. “Let me guess – the Chantry and the nation applauded him when he discovered that you were a mage, because Maker forbid that you dare get near the throne. Do I have it right?”

The silence that followed was so profound that I did not hear a single horse on the street, nor the great amount of noise coming from downstairs. All of Thedas had stilled to curse my sarcasm. At that moment, however, my stomach surged as I came to the realization of who exactly I had been sleeping with for the past three years. This was no longer just about mages and templars. A king’s son had destroyed the Chantry in Kirkwall.

This had just become a world war.

“No,” I said in a soft voice. “No. No. No. Please, Anders. Tell me that this is some kind of joke.” I stood up, my entire body tensing as I stepped backward, meeting the thin wooden wall behind me. “Tell me that you considered your position in this. Tell me that you have some sort of plan that makes sense of all of this!”

“My brother, Markus, is a high ranking Templar.” Anders continued to stare at me as if I had not just spoken. “Two weeks ago, he and several hundred Templars broke away from the Chantry after they heard news of what happened in Kirkwall. Markus declared a state of martial law in Hossberg, and began to systematically kill every mage that he laid his hands on. When my father tried to stop him, for fear that it would cause a revolution among the people, Markus assassinated him and my mother.” His voice broke again, but this time, he did not restrain his tears.

“Are you the older brother?” I knew that I shouldn’t shout. Most of Cumberland could likely hear our discussion at this point. “Tell me!”

Anders closed his eyes, swallowing hard before he spoke. His hands began to shake as he drew a few deep, quick breaths. Red heat crept into his cheeks, and colored his forehead. “I’m losing control. I’m sorry. I can’t hold –“

Suddenly, his mouth gaped open wide, and he drew a gasping breath, eyes wide as they began to glow blue. I saw his skin fracturing, cracking, veins of blue light covering his face, and in a moment, I knew that I could stop this before it began. This couldn’t happen. Not now. Not here. Not in a highly populated area, where ramshackle homes and shops hugged one another and the slim, filthy road, where more innocents might be harmed.

Raising my right hand, I cast a very potent stunning spell, one that would have placed any average person in a short coma. For an abomination, I assumed that the spell would not have such a potent bite.

He hadn’t seen it coming or, no doubt, he would have attacked me with such unimaginable furor that I would not have been able to defend myself. However, I had either acted very quickly or been very lucky. Anders opened his mouth as if to say something, and then fell backwards on the bed, his arms splayed, eyes closed. The signs of the Fade vanished as quickly as they had appeared.

I gathered my wits about me just long enough to cast a counter to my own spell. Then, trembling, I slid down the wall, my back to the wood, and sat next to the pile of supplies. My hands shook as I covered my face, my fingers slick with the sweat from my own forehead.

The spell had sapped me of my energy. I had to find something to eat. Allowing myself a few moments to be hidden in the dark warmth of my own hands, I raised my head, reached for the bag that I had abandoned, and found dried fruit inside – pears, peaches, apples, and grapes. I tried not to gobble them, but no one was watching, and I needed the nourishment and energy. I grabbed, tore, shoved, and swallowed, hardly chewing, my stomach grumbling gratefully.

Another bag revealed cheese, bread, and dried meat wrapped in paper. I left the bread and meat alone, but I did take a significant portion of the cheese, devouring it like a hungry animal. Forcing myself to close the bag even while I still chewed, I rocked back on my knees and brushed off my hands on my robes. This food wasn’t meant to be eaten in one day. We were running out of money; we left Kirkwall with the few sovereigns in our pockets, and I had no doubt that the Chantry had frozen our joint bank holdings.

I didn’t like considering the possibility that we would have to find work and perhaps be forced to settle in a city for awhile. We could not travel for much longer on little money, and I knew that the time would be arriving when I would not be able to travel at all.

Now that we had a roof over our heads, and food, at least for the moment, I felt the crushing desire to sit down and think about what had happened to us. I had full confidence that I could formulate a plan, but I needed time. Resources and connections were also beneficial, but not critical.

If Anders was incapable of driving our next steps, then I would have to do it for the both of us.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is a fleeting moment of happiness.

“Hnn…mmmgh…arng…”

I did not know what time it was, and once I realized what I was hearing, I pretended that I was still sleeping, my face to the wall, Anders’ bolero jacket draped over my shoulders and acting as a very insufficient blanket.

The mattress rustled. The floor creaked. I heard the unmistakable sound of his joints popping as he moved, followed by the soft clunk of the chamber pot being placed on the ground, the lid being removed, and a series of soft splashes as it was filled. The lid slipped back on.

The floorboards groaned again, but this time, his soft footsteps stopped next to me. As the jacket was dragged from my shoulders, the cool, moist air kissed my hands. I heard his knees crack as he bent over. One arm slid beneath my shoulders, the other under my legs, and he picked me up, drawing me next to his body.

“Mm,” I mumbled, allowing myself to rest my head against his shoulder, but the moment passed quickly. He carried me to the mattress and set me upon it, my face toward the wall.

He did not lie down next to me. Not yet. First there was the rustle of cloth against skin, then the weight of his body against the mattress, yet not stillness, not until I heard his boots, one by one, drop to the floor.

Only then did he curl up next to me, his chest to my back, his bare arms curling around me.

We both smelled of the road, of starvation and terrible weather, and unwashed garments. I had never gone this long without at least having a wash in a basin. Even on the road from Lothering, we took turns washing in whatever clean water we could find, and Aveline showed Carver and me how to scrape and beat our clothes against rocks after they had been dunked and allowed to soak.

Even Gamlen owned a flimsy tin washtub and a bar of soap or two.

As I drifted back to sleep, the sound of Anders’ breathing in my ear, I felt grateful that this tiny room didn’t contain a single looking glass.

*****

I rose just after sunrise, noticing that Anders was still fast asleep. I put on my stockings and boots, gently draped his jacket over his bare back, and left him there, sprawled on his belly, his mouth gaping slightly.

I wanted to take a walk down to the sea. I needed to think without Anders being present. Looking at him caused me to think differently about him. I needed a time when I could be objective.

The morning dawned with air that was both thick with chill and fog. I found a wide avenue that seemed to have the most maritime buildings – fishmongers, ship carpenters, and the like – and took it south, down a hill, and found my way to the docks and sandy beach that spread on both sides. The fog became so very thick that I could hardly see the waves of the Waking Sea lapping the shoreline.

I found a large boulder with a flat, smooth top near a sheltered cove that held a fisherman’s boat and a few crates. Here, I sat, tucking my legs beneath me.

Frederick. Anders. Frederick. Anders. Crown Prince of the Anderfels. Dangerous mage, apostate, abomination.

Terrorist.

It was a matter of time before someone made the connection between him and the Anderfels. First Enchanter Irving of the Ferelden Circle might make the assumption that Anders had been responsible for the destruction of the Kirkwall Chantry in front of Templars and under the worst possible circumstances. And then what?

He had merged with Vengeance. Experience taught me and told me that he was living on borrowed time. Events caused the situation to grow worse, not better. Negative events would upset him. Cause him to change into Andraste-knew-what, and whatever that was could be more powerful than before. Abominations weren’t exactly easy to overlook. We wouldn’t be able to hide forever.

I knew what I faced, and as I articulated it in my thoughts, I drew my legs out from under me, placed my hands on my knees, and squeezed them in comfort.

Eventually, I would be unable to control him. I would have to leave him to whatever fate the Maker ordained for him, be it death at his own hand or by the sword of another.

No. There had to be a way around this. There always was.

I knew that Anders could not go to the Anderfels in his current state. We would never make it down the Imperial Highway without some magister noticing or sensing his condition. Even if we did, Anders had become incapable of objectiveness. The Chantry tragedy was prime proof of this. This was a political matter, and it involved give and take. Negotiations. Effort to give both sides a satisfactory conclusion. We did not know what Markus had accomplished with his coup. If he took the throne, no doubt that we would soon hear of it. If the Circle in the Anderfels fell victim to Annulment, it would be a fact shouted by every town crier from Val Royaux to Rivain.

There had to be a way.

My mind rested on Justice, who had fully merged with Anders. How much did Anders know about his own condition? Perhaps Vengeance or Justice or whoever had joined with Anders’ own soul could be reasoned with. Or separated.

No. It was not possible. One could not cure an abomination.

“I knew that I would find you here.” I smelled the mint tea that Anders carried before he even reached my side. “You always liked the water.”

I turned my head, smiling at him. “So do you.” I tilted my head as I gestured at the foggy waves just beyond. “Are you going swimming?”

He twisted his mouth in what appeared to be a mock frown. “Maker, no! Have you felt how cold that water is? I’d end up with bits of me all shriveled up. Bits I really don’t want shriveled up.”

I laughed, my gaze falling to the delicate cup in his hand. “Where did you get that cup? We can’t afford it.”

“I stole it.” Anders leaned his staff against the rock and sat next to me, extending the cup in my direction.

“We’re thieves now, on top of everything else?” I took the cup despite myself, and took a sip. My eyes fluttered closed for a moment. Usually, I wasn’t a fan of mint tea, but to a hungry mouth, it tasted like a slice of the Fade itself.

“I was going to steal their cat, as well, since they left that outside with the teacup.” He replied with a careless wave of his hand. “I was also thinking about a great deal.”

“What were you thinking about?” I tried to keep the conversation light-hearted, despite the seriousness of the thoughts that I had just been turning over in my mind. Anders appeared to be in a decent mood. There was no sense spoiling it for the moment.

Yet, it was spoiled. “Unpleasant things. I was trying my best to see the sunny side of it all, but in the end, there just isn’t one.” Crossing his arms over his thin chest, Anders stared out at the expanse of water before us, his humor dimming even as the fog diminished. “You do realize that even if I am able to reclaim my throne, even if the mages are freed of the Chantry, I don’t have much time left.”

My hand sought his, and found it, my fingertips gracing the rough skin on the back of his hand. He slid his fingers into mine, and grasped them with a firm but not painful grip.

A lump formed in my throat, but I swallowed hard to avoid it. “As long as Vengeance lives inside of you, no, you don’t have a lot of time. Even if we find some way of ridding him from you, you have a decade, maybe a bit more, before the corruption in your blood begins to end you.”

His head turned quickly, and I found myself consumed in his vulnerable, aching gaze. “And yet, knowing all of this, seeing what I have done – you are still here.”

“Anders,” I murmured, “you can stop saying that.” With my free hand, I reached up to touch one of his unshaven cheeks. In Kirkwall, he frequently forgot to shave for days on end. Now, it appeared as if he was actively attempting to grow a full beard.

“I’ve made a decision.” He caught the hand on his face in both of his hands, and drew it to his lips. His brown eyes never once left my face. “I’m through running away. It is time to embrace every part of myself, even the parts that I tried to forget. I want you to call me Frederick from now on. I want to bring you into a new life – my old life – which I want to embrace for you. You were denied the opportunity to become Viscountess of Kirkwall because you were a mage, yet your influence – the many people so willing to follow your command – was testament to your Maker-given gift in drawing out the best of all of them.” He still held my hand, but now at his chest, pressing it against the leather jerkin and worn shirt underneath. I could feel his heart racing within. “If I am to regain the throne, the mages will not need to settle for independent governances in their own towers where they were once forcibly confined. They will have an entire nation to live in, to raise their families in, and to restore to its former glory.” He drew a sharp breath, his eyes coming alive with something wonderful that I could not name. “Marry me, and rule by my side.”

The proposal did not surprise me. Anders – no, Frederick – had been hinting at it for several months. Even Varric asked me repeatedly if Anders had proposed, and one time, let it slip that he had seen Anders examining rings at a jeweler’s stall in the Lowtown Market.

I knew already that Anders had bought one, then tried to hide the purchase in our house accounts by claiming that it had been a shipment of Orlesian wines for the wine cellar. I found bottles of the cheapest dwarven swill with their labels removed, but nothing in the wine cellar that I knew would amount to twenty crowns.

Plus, Anders was never much of a wine drinker. He preferred a smooth Ferelden mead or a thick beer from Rivain.

I laughed quietly and leaned over, pressing my lips against his. “It’s about time that you asked me,” I said, immediately searching his face for a reaction.

I was astonished to see that he was smiling, then laughing too, as he pulled me back into his arms. “Another revolutionary act – apostates marrying and building a new world,” he said, still chuckling. “If that doesn’t shake Thedas, I don’t know what will.”

I tipped up my head, waiting for his lips to rest on mine again, for the world to vanish for even the smallest of moments. In that single space of time, there was nameless hope in the face of impossible odds, and I was content with just that.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Anders and Hawke make an unlikely ally.

The world, however, had other plans for us.

The shouts of men tumbled across one another, and I could hear a woman talking, though I could not hear what she said. I saw Anders look past me. His eyes grew wide. His hand on my arm became like iron, and he jerked me toward the edge of the rock as he himself slid off and behind it.

“What -?” I followed him, kneeling on the sand for a moment, before I let myself peek around the edge of the boulder.

Eight men occupied the fishing cove now, some laughing as they pushed what appeared to be a young girl among themselves. Each time she changed hands, I saw those hands grab her, fondling her…no. She was not a young girl, but a dwarf. I could see the fear plainly on her face, and hear the plea in her voice, though from this distance I could not understand what she said.

“Do you trust me?” Anders held his staff tightly in one hand.

“Yes,” I said in an uneasy voice, knowing very well that what I said wasn’t exactly the truth.

Two of the men pushed the dwarf against the polished rock of a vast cliff face as a third began to unlace his trousers. Her screams pierced the fog and darkened the day.

“Good.” Anders stood up. “You take the two on the left. I have the remaining six. Stay at range.” He began to move swiftly toward the group, bent over in an attack stance, his free hand clenched into a fist.

“What do you mean, two? I can take more than two. Anders, wait…“ I chased after him, quickly walking as I tried to keep my voice quiet, but my head was most definitely filled with questions about his strategy.

Anders paused only when one of my would-be targets turned his head in our direction. “Hey!” The man shouted, his teeth showing, his lips curling. “Move on. This ain’t any of your business.”

Several other faces jerked toward us. The one with his trousers open froze in shock, seeming to forget that he had left himself in full view and uncovered.

I didn’t need to see Anders’ face. I saw the shards of the Fade taking over his body, shining through the fog like a beacon. I could feel the Veil itself for a moment – a shiver, a feeling that something was in the world that should not be there.

The faces of the attackers, one by one, turned deathly pale.

“Shit,” said the one who had spoken before.

Anders charged at the group, and I immediately threw a tightly-compacted fireball at the nearest man. As my victim’s clothes burst into flames, leaving him screaming and dashing for the sea, Anders slammed his staff on the ground, casting a force spell that knocked three of them onto their backs. One of them charged for Anders, a short sword in one hand. I pivoted on my heels, throwing a spike of ice at another man, which was meant to impale his chest but instead, painfully, removed the flesh of the left side of his face. The man jerked, screaming, his hands clawing at his lidless eye as he fell to the ground.

Anders parried the attacker with the short sword, knocked it from the man’s hands, and cast an ice spell that started at the feet, quickly immobilizing him as it grew to his knees and thighs, and left him screaming for a few seconds as it overcame his torso, neck, and head.

The man that I had set on fire crawled out of the ocean waves, screaming, having obviously forgotten that salt on raw, burned flesh made for a horrible combination. He drew his knife, stumbling and crying out as he ran at me. I cast a stunning spell at him, and followed it with a ball of ice, which came into contact with his head as he fell to the ground. I heard a sickening crack, and he did not get up again.

Tripping another attacker, Anders turned, shattering the frozen man with a mighty blow of his staff. Chunks of frozen flesh and ice showered the ground and immediately began to melt in the heat of the day. The one that he had tripped dashed his head against a rock, and blood immediately oozed from the wound. He struggled for a moment, then stopped moving.

One of the remaining men let out a horrified shout, and three began to run together, heading toward the street. Anders drew his dagger from his belt, the one that he used more as a tool to cut things rather than a weapon, and threw it the back of one of them, casting a firestorm spell even before the dagger reached its intended victim. All three burst into flames, the one with the dagger in his back falling down first as the other two jerked and screamed.

The scent of burned flesh stained the salty sea air.

Anders strode over to his dagger’s victim, pulled it from the man’s back, and started toward the one remaining attacker – the one with his trousers now around his knees, his loincloth askew, more of his body revealed than he likely intended, his face filled with horror. I saw Anders toss aside his own staff carelessly, his fingers curling around the hilt of the dagger. The would-be attacker no longer held onto the dwarf woman, who charged at me, weeping as she threw her arms around me, burying her face into my robes. I held her tightly, my fingers sinking into her red hair.

I knew that Anders was not a physically strong man – not as strong as Varric, who had once carried Sebastian, in full plate armor and unconscious, from a fight, and certainly not nearly so as my brother nor Fenris. Yet, the spirit of Justice – or whatever Justice had become – gave Anders the strength to seize a man who was both taller and of greater girth than he, turn him around, and slam him against the rock face behind him. Leaning against the half-naked man, Anders dagger hand disappeared from my view, and at first, I thought he had stabbed the attacker in the belly.

I was wrong.

The attacker cried out, a few hysterical sobs escaping his lips. “No. Oh, please. Please.”

“Not the first woman you’ve taken by force, is she?” Anders snarled between clenched teeth. Grabbing the man around the waist with his free hand, he slammed him against the rock wall again.

“Oh, Maker,” whimpered the man, his eyes wide. “Please. Please. Mercy.”

“What, you think I won’t do it? Because I’m a man?” I had never seen Anders like this, not in all the time I knew him. This wasn’t Justice or Vengeance, but something new, something terrible that enjoyed feeling his victim’s terror. His voice filled with the deepest cruelty.

I heard the sickening sound of blood spilling – a lot of blood. The attacker let out an ear-curdling shriek, and Anders stepped aside, allowing him to merely fall to the ground.

“You know? I would.” Tossing the bloody organ aside as if it were garbage, Anders wiped his hand on his jerkin. He began to methodically clean his dagger, his glowing blue eyes occasionally coming to rest on my face.

The dwarf woman looked up from my robes, a few quiet sobs escaping her lips. “That’ll…that’ll show him,” she stammered.

Letting out a stream of high-pitched cries, the attacked writhed in the dirt, his legs curling and uncurling as they became drenched with blood. “You cut off my…you mad son of a bitch…” He whimpered.

Stooping over, Anders retrieved his staff from the sand. “Yes,” he said in tones that sounded almost bored. “I am mad.”

“Frederick,” I said quietly, “that’s enough, now.” I had less than a moment to hope, hope, that he would listen to me, that somehow I could influence him from attacking the unfortunate dwarf next, or even myself.

Instead, he turned, lunged at the man, and planted his staff into the man’s chest. Blood spurted upward into a fine spray, and I heard a choking noise utter from the attacker. Then, his body fell limp.

Anders planted a boot on the man’s chest, withdrew his staff, and held it loosely in one hand, even as it still dripped with gore. “Do not be so disrespectful to my mother,” he said as he still stared at the dead body, his voice a low, reverberating growl.

I stepped away from the dwarf, trying my best to still my breathing, yet it came out in short, desperate gasps. My head swam with the mere thought that I had encouraged this. I had approved of this. Less than ten minutes before, I had let Anders empower himself on purpose. I had placed us all in danger.

This was careless - and I had been careless a great deal in my time. I had allowed an uncontrollable, unrestrained weapon to cause a great deal of destruction, even if it was warranted.

This topped all.

“Frederick,” I whispered. “Let’s go.” I touched his sleeve with very light fingers.

When he looked at me, the glow had vanished from his eyes, and the veins of blue faded away. An expression of horror crossed his face, and he closed his eyes, leaning forward to press his face against my shoulder.

“Wait –“said the dwarf woman, her voice filled with desperation. “Please. Wait.”

I looked over at her. In truth, I wanted nothing more to take Anders back to our room, to find some water to clean the blood from our clothes and Anders’ weapons, and to pretend that this all had never happened.

But as I looked at her, at the ripped robes and the black bruise rapidly forming around one of her eyes, I knew that I had to lay aside our troubles for a second.

“Are you alright?” I said, taking stock of her appearance. A dwarf wearing robes, even a female dwarf, was unusual.

“I’ll be fine.” Her shaking voice told me the opposite. She tilted her head in a curious manner, despite her apparent fear, and raised her eyebrows. “Please – are you both apostates?”

I knew that she must be very traumatized by her attack and the great violence that followed, but I wasn’t exactly willing to play this game at this exact moment. I raised my chin. “Yes,” I said. “Are you a templar?”

“Oh, no.” She shook her head, clasping both hands together. “It’s alright. I’m a mage too. That is – I know, dwarves can’t cast magical spells, and I’m not really a mage, but I’m employed to a mage. My research is in lyrium, and I keep him supplied, and alter the lyrium in whatever manner he needs. I have a bit of an uncanny knack of finding it, too, whenever we go down to the Deep Roads.” She said all of this without breathing, the words tumbling over one another.

“That’s brilliant.” I offered her my best smile, given the circumstances. I didn’t feel like being rude or short to someone that had just suffered a significant trauma.

She gestured toward Anders, though she still spoke to me “Your husband is an abomination, am I right?”

“One: we’re not married. Two: I can hear you. Three: I would think that was obvious. Are you going to call the guard?” Anders said without lifting his head from my shoulder.

I was astonished to see the dwarf break into a wide smile. “That’s great! My master would love to meet you. His primary research is in the study of abominations. He’s trying to find a cure, a way to separate the soul and the invading demon or spirit.”

“No offense, but that sounds like a terrible idea.” Anders turned his head slightly, hiding his face against my neck. “I don’t want to be a research project.”

“My master is Lucius Quintus,” the dwarf said quickly.

The name did not sound familiar to me, but apparently it did to Anders. He lifted his head in surprise. “What?”

“Mm.” The smile remained on her lips as she nodded. “My name is Dagna, formerly of Orzammar.”

“Wait.” Anders held up a hand. “What’s he doing in Cumberland?”

“Who is he?” I looked to Anders, feeling lost on the significance of the name and definitely wanting more information.

“Imperial Senator. One of the foremost researchers in necromancy in Thedas.” Anders’ words tinged with suspicion as he narrowed his eyes. “Also wanted by the Chantries in Orlais and the Anderfels for practicing necromancy within their borders.”

“Oh, that.” Dagna shook her head, sniffling as she did so. “Those were his younger days, he says. He has dedicated his life now to the study of, as he says, ‘the worst afflictions plaguing mages in this modern era’.”

Anders stepped away from me. I could tell from both his face and posture that he remained unconvinced. “How much success has he had with his research? And why have I heard nothing about this? Apostate or no, I haven’t kept my head in the sand when it comes to the most beneficial research coming out of the Circles.”

“Ah, he doesn’t live in a Circle.” Dagna twisted her hands together, her lips also becoming tighter for a moment. “His research is considered critical to the Imperium, so he is allowed free travel, just as long as he checks in with the Chantry in any city that he stops in.”

Making a noise of dissent, Anders said, “You mean that the Archon’s got a hand in his money pouch. You never said if he had any success with his research.”

Dagna appeared even more uneasy. “He, uh, hasn’t. Not yet. Wait, wait!” She held up a hand in an effort to stop Anders, who had quickly turned to leave, and then paused in his steps to turn back to her. “Ah, he has a few test subjects that are in the middle of the separation phase. He even found another mage who wanted to join in his research – an abomination, too. They’ll be here in two days.”

Anders raised his eyebrows. “Did he mention anything about this mage?”

“Only that she was about his age, and an abomination,” Dagna smoothly replied. “Apparently, her case is rather advanced, but Master Lucius says that her spirit isn’t harmful to anyone else.”

Crossing his arms, Anders tilted his head slightly, the suspicious expression returning to his face. “You never said what your Master is doing in Cumberland. Is he looking for slaves?”

“Oh, no!” Dagna smiled a bit. “He doesn’t keep slaves. I wouldn’t have asked to work for him if he did. He has a second home here that he likes to visit whenever the city gets a bit overwhelming. His ‘country home’, he calls it.” She opened her arms wide. “Say, even if you don’t want to participate in his research, why don’t the both of you come back to his home with me? It’s just me all alone in the tower, and there’s plenty of food and books to read. At least let me make a midday meal for the two of you. What do you say?”

I blinked hard in disbelief. “Dagna, are you sure you’re alright? I know that I would be extremely distressed if I had just endured the violence that you did.”

She cast her eyes to the ground. “To be honest,” she said in an uneasy voice, “I don’t really want to be alone right now. You two saved my life, and I want to reward you.” She looked back up at my face, her demeanor significantly less bubbly. “Look, it’s a lot to ask of two total strangers, but I have spent the better part of the last ten years among mages. I can make you a good meal – two, if you want – and offer some pleasing conversation. And I know that you won’t…harm me.” Her hands trembled for a moment before she hid them away behind her back.

I watched Anders’ face soften. Bending over, he reached out a hand toward her face, fingertips toward her blackened eye. “You’ve got some bleeding here,” he said softly. “In the eye itself. I can heal this for you, and cast an incantation for the pain, but I’d rather not do it where we can be seen.”

It was as if he had forgotten our maelstrom of spells cast just a few moments beforehand that cost eight men their lives.

Nodding her head, Dagna said, “To the tower, then. Follow me.” She started back toward the fisherman’s cove, past the bloodstained sand and corpses that had already started to stiffen. “Do you both like clam chowder? I make a good clam chowder. I have fresh clams from the fishmonger.”

Exchanging glances with Anders, I said, “That sounds delicious, Dagna.” I forced a smile onto my face again, but thought of a good idea, perhaps to give us a greater chance to discover what this Magister was really up to. “You know, why don’t you let me cook? You can rest, and Frederick here can heal your eye. I think I can make a decent chowder myself.”

“Oh, that would be great.” Dagna looked somewhat relieved as she looked back at me. “By the way, I didn’t catch your name.”

“Leandra.” I didn’t skip a beat, nor did I chance looking at Anders for approval. I instead walked where Dagna walked, down a small strip of beach that hugged the rock face, rounding a tight corner, and coming face to face with a thick wooden door.

Puzzled for a moment, I looked from the door upward, higher, toward a window, and then a second, a third, a fourth, and a fifth – all carved directly into the rock face itself, each appearing happenstance and uneven, so that no ship passing by would notice its presence. No one would ever think that anything, let alone a tower that belonged to a Imperial Senator, would stand past the fisherman’s cove.

Dagna unlocked the door, opened it, and stepped in a wide chamber with a low ceiling. The floor was thick with plush rugs, and several chaise lounges stood before a hearth complete with a roaring fire. Bookshelves lined the smooth stone walls, and where books did not rest, artifacts of all kinds stood on their own or on tables. Next to the door where we had entered, a suit of Grey Warden armor stood on a stand, its surface polished to a high shine.

“I hate to impose,” Anders murmured, catching my eye for a moment with a knowing glance of his own. “Do you have a place where we both can wash up before we eat? I’ve got blood in my hair.”

“Oh, I’m a fool. I’m sorry.” Dagna shook her head. “You’re not imposing at all. Come. The Master has two separate guest suites that he never even uses. You can use the washtub and washbasin in the red suite. I just put fresh towels in there, too. Oh! There’s running water, just like in the Tevinter Circles.” She beckoned toward us as she started toward a winding staircase that led the way toward the upper floors. “Take your time. I could use a wash, myself. Oh, let me know if there’s anything you need. Anything at all.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Hawke takes control of the situation, and they both get a taste of Tevinter magitech.

The red suite was filled with thick, overstuffed furniture from Tevinter – stiff yet carved columns meeting with richly embroidered red velvet stuffed with the softest downy feathers. I stared at the bed, which itself required the small step ladder that leaned against it, and knew that the moment I so much as sat upon the thick, soft silk duvet that I was likely to sink into a profound sleep from which I could not be awoken.

Off the bedroom, we discovered a small chamber that held its own wash basin, water closet, and the largest washtub that I had ever seen. Carved of the very rock that comprised the cliff face and the outer walls of the hidden tower, it could have easily held four persons, perhaps more.

“I’m envious,” I murmured as I began to unlace my boots. “I wish I could have had this in the mansion.”

“They don’t have tubs like this outside of the Imperium and the occasional brothel.” Anders removed his jacket, then started on his own boots. “It’s a shame that we’ll get clean only to dress in filthy clothes again.”

I wanted to make a pointed comment about Anders’ remark concerning the washtubs in brothels. Certainly the state of our clothes was a distraction to my clouded mind. Least of all was our impending state of nudity, which, while a pleasing state, fell quickly away from the forefront of my thoughts.

Instead, I saw Anders in my mind, over and over, torturing Dagna’s attacker. I heard the cruelty in his voice, and saw the joy in his face at the man’s pain. This was not the Anders I knew. Not even Vengeance took mean-spirited joy in his own actions.

This was not to say that the attacker did not deserve his fate. My focus, however, was on further damning evidence that my intended husband had fallen so far.

As I allowed my last bit of clothing to drop to the floor, I climbed into the bare tub, shivering, and found myself face to face with a strange spigot – a cross between the spout on a water pump and some sort of bizarre device. A number of wheels with teeth covered the portion closest to the wall.

I touched one of the wheels lightly, and it sprung to life, turning with the others, causing the others to spin. Warm, pleasant water began to pour from the spout, filling the tub.

“Well, isn’t that interesting?” I said, watching as the water flowed and the wheels spun. “How do I turn it off?”

“Just touch the faucet again.” Anders pointed at a small rubber object attached to a short length of delicate chain. “Use that stopper there to plug the drain.”

I noticed that he was staring at me, and not with the sort of expression that suggested that he had erotic things on his mind. Sadness tinged his voice and face. “You’re far too thin.”

“So are you.” I could count the ribs in his chest, and knew that if I were to reach out and touch his hip, I would find virtually no flesh between my fingertips and the bones there.

“I’m accustomed to starving.” Anders sunk into the water next to me and sat cross-legged, his back against one of the sides. The expression of concern did not leave him, even as his body seemed to relax in the warm water surrounding us.

I found myself occupied with the events that we had just left behind, and couldn’t continue this small talk any longer. It just felt too forced for my tastes. “Frederick, what happened on the beach?” I murmured as I picked up a bar of soap and began to rub it between my hands. I was careful to avoid his gaze. I did not want to appear confrontational when confronting him was exactly what I meant to do. Appearing as a threat would be the worst thing I could possibly do at the moment. “I’ve seen you give yourself over on purpose, but that’s not what happened, is it?”

Silence fell between us for a moment. I used that opportunity to use a thumbnail to poke some soap under the rest of my fingernails, and then washed my hands clean in the running water. I tapped my fingers against the wheels, which began to spin slower and slower before stilling completely.

“I heard a voice.” Anders sounded so very sad that I wanted to look up at him, but I refused to do so. I pretended to busy myself with wetting my short hair and covering it in soap. “It told me that I could be so much more than Justice would allow. It promised me that I could control it if I wanted. I wouldn’t succumb to blind rage. I could keep my thoughts.”

“A voice?” I could no longer help myself, and found myself staring into his melting brown eyes. He was fighting back tears, but just barely. “It wasn’t Justice – Vengeance – whoever? You didn’t recognize it?”

“I did recognize it.” Anders gave a shake of his head. “But I can’t tell you – I don’t remember –“ The words caught in his throat, and he made a choking noise. He drew a quick breath, then continued, “Perhaps it was a demon I met at my Harrowing, or it could have been –“

“A demon?” Maker, this was getting worse. Worse and worse by the moment. I fought the urge to grab Anders and hold him close. I forced myself to stay calm. “Could you tell if it was speaking from the Fade?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” Anders closed his eyes, his tongue darting out to lick his lips. Very slowly, he drew his legs to his chest, hugging his bony knees as he rested his face against them. “I need some time to meditate. I can sort all of this out, but I just need time.”  
I didn’t need time to mull over what he said. I didn’t believe him. Not in the slightest. Whatever was happening to him had very quickly grown out of his capacity to sort any of it out.

I had to remain calm for the both of us.

Drawing a quick breath, I dunked my head in the water, sat up, and then continued to lather soap onto my skin. My thoughts rested on our current position, and the opportunities at hand. In the early days, when I first came to Kirkwall, I would have quickly snapped up such a chance regardless of risk.

“I think we should take Dagna up on her offer, but take the opportunity to find out more about this Senator Quintus.” Extending the bar of soap toward Anders, I pressed it against one of his legs. “We’ll tell him nothing more than the fact that we’re Ferelden apostates running from the Chantry. You will make sure that he pays you for your time, and if you feel that there is too much at stake, we will leave.”

Anders reluctantly took the soap from me with one hand. Reaching behind his head, he released his hair from its topknot with his free hand, placing the leather thong that had formerly held his hair fast on the edge of the tub. “There is already too much at stake. We don’t know who this second researcher is, and I happen to know a more than a few mages that I wouldn’t want to cross again. What if Quintus’s plan was to force me out and let whatever is left take over my body?”

“Anders, you are not even sure what is happening in your own body anymore.” It was a horrible, hard thing to say, but it needed to be said. “You need help – more help than I can provide, and greater expertise than you yourself can wield. You cannot fight a revolution as you are now. You can’t fight any war like this. You can’t regain the throne that is rightfully yours. What about the citizens of the Anderfels, who will pledge their very lives to you? Have you even thought it over? Have you considered the consequences of being completely out of control?” I couldn’t stop my own mouth, but I felt exhausted and at my absolute wits end.

“Marian, that’s enough.” Anders met my gaze with soft eyes. I knew that I had cut him to the quick.

I rose from the tub, water cascading down my body. “It’s the truth.” I stepped out of the water, my bare toes sinking into one of the thick rugs covering the stone floor. “I’m sorry. I love you, Frederick. I have chosen with my full heart and mind to be with you, but we are in over our heads – and you know it.”

He did not answer, and I think that was the worst part of it all. He did not look in direction. He simply held the bar of soap in both hands and stared at one of the stone walls. A few moments before, his face had been filled with misery. Now, I could not tell what he was thinking at all.

I dressed and left him there, in the cooling water that filled the large bathtub. I left the room, went down the stairs, and found my way to the kitchen.

*****  
“I have a very good friend that is a surface dwarf.” I crouched at the fire, stirring the cauldron that bubbled there, filled with thick, fragrant chowder that made my mouth water from just the smell. “Were you born on the surface as well?”

I didn’t have to veil the question. Dagna seemed to enjoy talking about herself. “Oh, no. I was born in Orzammar, as I said down on the beach. Ah, it’s alright. You probably forgot.” She continued to slice a loaf of bread with startling efficiency, each slice almost identical in size to the last. “I left Orzammar when I was sixteen and went to live at the Circle in Ferelden for a few years.”

“You have a very unusual history.” I scooped up a clam with my stirring spoon and tasted it. As the savory taste spread across my tongue, my stomach growled. “I’ve known very few dwarves that were interested in the study of magic. Most are petrified of it, to be honest.”

“Oh, well, it’s their loss,” Dagna said in a cheerful voice. “But I never would have had the chance to do it without the aid of the Hero of Ferelden!”

I nearly dropped the spoon in the chowder. I took a deep breath, composed myself, then said, “Really? You know the Warden-Commander? Er, Hero of Ferelden?”

“Queen Alemia? Sure, I do.” Dagna began to arrange the pieces of bread in an artful manner on a platter that bore the design of a rampant high dragon. “That is, I met her twice. She probably wouldn’t remember me. I met King Alastair too! But he wasn’t King Alastair back then. He was, to me, just some Grey Warden with a shield back then. How stupid I was!”

“You didn’t know any better.” I forced out a chuckle as I took up a towel, wrapped it around my right hand, and picked up the small cauldron from the hook that held it. “The chowder is ready. Frederick should be down in a moment.”

“He can take his time. There’s plenty of food.” Dagna set the platter on a rough wooden table. “I have cakes, too. Lemon ones. Master Lucius likes lemon. No harm will be done if we take a few.”

“That sounds nice. How did you meet the Warden-Commander? Er, Queen Alemia.” I silently swore, praying that Dagna wouldn’t peg me as a Grey Warden for my continuous accidental use of the title.

Moving across the room, Dagna swiftly climbed onto a wooden stepstool as if she did so several times a day, and opened a cabinet that was now within her reach. “The Grey Wardens were visiting Orzammar. I heard it had something to do with the Blight, but back then, I only cared about getting out of Orzammar and getting the chance to study magical theory. I did hear that the Queen and King fought a broodmother in the Deep Roads! Can you believe it?”

“I once heard a tale that concerned the Queen fighting several broodmothers near Amaranthine.” I had not heard Anders enter the kitchen, but saw him standing near the table rather suddenly. “She was in the company of a berserker dwarf, a Fade spirit, and an apostate as well. It may have just been a rumor, though. Can I help with anything?”

I shot Anders a withering look. He smiled back in a faux-pleasant fashion, his eyes narrowing slightly.

“That sounds fascinating!” Dagna still stood on the step ladder, and now held a teapot in one hand and a stack of bowls in another. “I would love to hear that story, even if it wasn’t true. Do you mind drinking Rivain coffee? There’s no tea in the tower. Master Lucius can’t stand it. Something about his late wife being addicted to the stuff.” Dagna wrinkled her nose. “They didn’t get along.”

Anders crossed the room and took the teapot from Dagna. “Well, it started when the apostate met the Queen at Vigil’s Keep after he had been captured by the Templars –“

“– Dagna, we were talking, Frederick and I,” I quickly interrupted him. “We have been discussing your offer.”

“Oh, have you?” I was glad to see that her attention could so quickly be pulled in another direction. She made her way down the ladder, setting the bowls on the table before going to retrieve three spoons from a drawer. “I was thinking about it, too. It must be weird, us being nearly strangers and all, for me to offer something that’s kind of personal. To Frederick, I mean. Say, Master Lucius may not even approve of me making the offer in the first place, though I can’t imagine why. Usually abominations aren’t discovered in the early stages, not by mages that stand the chance of helping them.”

“Or killing them,” Anders added in a dull voice. “I’m not exactly in the early stages of my condition. In fact, it’s very advanced.” He filled the teakettle from the pump near the washbasin.

Dagna held up a small burlap sack, then placed it on the table next to a mortar and pestle. “Who wants coffee?”

Anders hung the teakettle from the hook over the cooking fire. “I will have a cup.”

“Make that two.” I picked up the large spoon that rested against the side of the cauldron and began filling the bowls. “The situation is becoming desperate and we’re running out of options. If Senator Quintus is able to cure Frederick, how long do you think it will take?”

Dagna frowned. “Months? Years? He has patients in the Imperium that have been under his care for at least five years, definitely before I came to work for him.” She continued to crush the coffee as she spoke.

Anders and I exchanged silent glances.

Unfortunately, this did not go unnoticed by the dwarf. “Oh, I see,” she said quietly. “You’re apostates. You’re afraid of being caught by the Chantry if you stay too long in one place. No wonder you both were so thin and dirty when you saved me. You’re likely on the run right now.” She stood up straighter, not waiting for our answer. “We travel a great deal, and sometimes Master Lucius and I get very tired of talking about the same things to each other. You think this tower is empty? His home in Minrathous is even emptier. Downright spooky sometimes. I can make the case for the two of you to stay and travel with us, if you want. Master Lucius isn’t going to turn you two in. He opposes the Chantry – most of the Magisters do. The Archon certainly does. Master Lucius says that the Black Divine and the Archon are almost constantly at each other’s throats!”

“Have something to eat, everyone,” I said, my gaze specifically falling on Anders, who still stood by the cooking fire. Though he looked tense, I saw nothing else that might be a cause for concern. “I know I want some.” I chose a bowl for myself, sat, and tried to eat as slowly as I could, pacing my spoonfuls so that I didn’t appear as hungry as I truly was.

A few moments later, Anders settled on the bench next to me. As he ate, I half-expected him to touch me in some way. Perhaps to surreptitiously touch my leg, or my arm, as we used to do while having drinks at the Hanged Man with the rest of our companions.

He didn’t.

*****  
“I’m glad that you like my lobster and cheese buns,” gushed Dagna. She carried Anders’ jacket and jerkin, and my robes in her arms. “Master Lucius hates them. He says that anything from the sea should never touch anything from a cow.”

“That’s a shame.” Anders’ mood seemed to improve with each plate of food he consumed. “Nothing is better than a slice of nice roast beef smothered in sour cream and onions, and lying next to fried fish soaked in vinegar.”

I made a face of disgust. “All of that together? That’s horrid.”

I wore one of Dagna’s dressing gowns, which she herself admitted was quite too long for her, confessing that she liked the way the hem trained behind her when she walked. Still, what was too long for her was indecently short for me, the darkened, frayed hem falling midcalf on me. The dressing gown was tight in the arms, which fell at my elbows, and far too big in the bustline. Anders had chosen to keep his trousers and shirt.

“I’ll look through the closets and see if there are any clothes that one of Master Lucius’s former guests may have left behind,” Dagna said as she opened the door to the red suite for us. “And I’ll take care of these clothes while I’m at it. I promise that I’ll be careful. If I don’t think that I can get the jerkin clean, I’ll take it down to the tailor in the morning. Master Lucius has a running account with them.”

“Are you sure you want to do that, Dagna? That’s very kind.” I stepped in the room, looking back at her as I did so.

“I like washing laundry. Folding clothes clears my head.” She smiled up at me. “Anyway, get some rest. If I find any clothes I think that the two of you can use, I’ll leave them outside of your door. Good night!”

Anders also entered the room, placing his hand on the door. “Good night, Dagna. I’ll want to see that eye in the morning to make sure that it’s healing correctly.” I could tell from his tone of voice that he was making a great effort to maintain his cheer, but that effort had begun to fail.

“Sure. Sleep well!” She turned and headed down the stairs.

Anders closed the door behind us and turned the key in the lock. He leaned against the door, his back to the solid wood, his head tilted back. “She’s very kind, but I have a feeling that I will have to take her in very, very small doses,” he said in a soft, breathy voice.

I crossed my arms, raising an eyebrow. “What, are you afraid that her optimism is contagious? That you’ll catch a tinge of eternal cheerfulness and start laughing?”

His gaze fell on me, hard, piercing. He stood up straighter, his jaw tensing. It occurred to me then that though we had spent the day and evening together, we had never quite resolved the argument from that morning.

“Who knows, maybe that’s the cure we’ve been missing all along,” I continued, a smirk tugging at the corners of my mouth. “You abominations are so horridly depressing that the demons and spirits just muck about like children in a swimming hole.”

I half-expected him to walk past me and climb into the massive bed. I wasn’t sure what he would do. In truth, Dagna’s cheerfulness was contagious. Chatting between the three of us, all day long, about anything but a mage revolution had made me forget what was going on in the world around us. I needed just a few hours to forget about everything else. It had been rejuvenating.

Anders closed the distance between us so very quickly, moving like one of his beloved cats toward intended prey. In the final moments before he reached me, I saw a predatory expression reach his face.

“Maybe if you laughed every once in awhile –“ I began.

Then, I could speak no longer. His hands were on me, behind my neck, forcing my head up toward his, and he was kissing me. Hard. I stumbled, and he encouraged me to be off-balance, leading my body around, backward, toward the door. My back rested where his had just pressed, and as he broke the kiss for a moment, I found myself panting.

His eyes searched my face, moving from my forehead, my chin, and back to my own eyes. I did not allow him to make a second pass. I forced my lips against his, my tongue pushing into his mouth, our bodies mashing together, all heat and sweat and need. We parted only once more as he pulled open the laces on his trousers and I wrapped a leg around his waist. Gripping my right wrist with almost crushing force, he pinned my arm above my head.

It was over in a precious few minutes, but I think I received the apology I was looking for.

Afterwards, I still wore Dagna’s precious dressing gown, but Anders had chosen to divest himself of the rest of his clothing and sprawl on his back on the massive bed. He stroked the luxurious silk fabric of the dressing gown with his fingertips, parted the folds, and revealed my bare skin beneath. Tracing circles on my flat belly, he left gooseflesh behind in his wake.

“You know,” he murmured, moving to rest his head on one of the overstuffed pillows, “if we weren’t in fear of our lives, with Maker-knows-what happening in Kirkwall, I’d want to stay here for awhile.” His teeth grazed my earlobe.

“Shh.” Turning over on my belly, I lay my head on his shoulder. “I’m pretending that we’re on a honeymoon in Rivain.” I wasn’t, but I hoped that the conversation would divert him from revolutions and wars, even if for a few minutes.

“Oh?” He drew me into his arms, a light sigh escaping his lips. “Tell me about it.”

“It’s warm,” I whispered as I stroked the bare, nearly hairless skin of his chest. “We spent the day on the beach in a tent eating roasted clams that we cooked ourselves. We’ve been drinking the entire day, slowly though, to be just drunk enough that the world is hazy and perfect. We hang a hammock between two palm trees, and climb in, laying just as we are now –“

I trailed off. Anders’ breathing had grown quiet and steady. The arms that had once held me fast were now limp and heavy.

Smiling to myself, I closed my eyes, allowing myself to float into whatever dreams that the Fade might shape for me.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which two abominations have a standoff.

I woke up to the sound of unfamiliar voices, to the thudding of objects banging against one another, and the cheerful tones of Dagna mixed in, though I could not understand what she said.

I found myself astonished that Anders and I had slept through the night as I looked to the window, which provided an incredible view of the sea, and the rays of a sun that was not newly dawned. I could not recall a night when Anders did not wake me up screaming from a nightmare about his imprisonment in solitary confinement, or with darkspawn down in the Deep Roads marching through his dreams.

As he sat up next to me, I saw that he appeared fully rested and refreshed, the dark rings under his eyes greatly diminished, and his cheeks not so pale.

“Sounds like the Senator is home early.” Anders pushed back the bedclothes and moved toward the stepladder at the edge of the bed. “I wonder if Dagna found anything fetching for us to wear. I’ll go see.”

I looked down at my lap. Sure enough, my assessment had been incorrect; I knew that I had not fallen asleep tucked into the various array of duvets, sheets, and blankets upon the bed. Sometime during the night, Anders had awoken and seen to that.

“You’re naked,” I reminded him. “Careful with the door.”

“I knew it felt a bit drafty.” Anders opened the door, picked up a covered tray, and half-closed the door with his foot. “Looks like she delivered breakfast. There’s something more. I’ll get it in a moment.” Setting the tray on the bed, he returned to the door.

Crawling across the bed, I lifted the cover off of the tray. An incredible, sweet aroma flooded into the room, and I saw a breakfast unlike any I’d eaten in my entire life – scrambled eggs, warm strawberry pastries, fresh cream, sliced apples, and a small pot of coffee.

“Dagna doesn’t need to work with lyrium, she needs to be a personal cook,” I said in an awed voice.

Anders shut the door and crossed the room, several folded piles of fabric in his arms. “Should we hire her on at the end of the war, when we buy that kitten farm in Tantervale?”

“Let’s cross that bridge when we get to it.” I swallowed a bite of apple and licked my fingers. “What sort of clothes did she find?”

“Old Ferelden Circle robes. Brings back memories.” Setting the pile next to the tray, he hoisted himself back onto the bed and next to me, wrapping one of the sheets around his waist. “Is that coffee?”

“It is.” I tore off a piece of one of the strawberry pastries and held it in front of him, spending a moment to gaze at Anders. “You know, your mood is better when you sleep well.”

He leaned forward, taking the bite of pastry into his mouth, his lips grazing my fingers. Sitting back against the pillows, he chewed, and then said, “Perhaps it was because of the whole bit when I apologized to you.”

Offering him another slice of pasty, I smiled at him. “I like this new way of apologizing. Could you do it that way in the future?”

A rare smug grin touched his lips just before I fed him again. He said nothing.

*****  
I did not know how much time passed between the sound of the voices and the knock on our door. Anders and I ate and drank everything on the platter, leaving only small crumbs behind. We had time to bathe, change into the robes, and even remark at the amazing view from the window.

The robes fit us rather badly, as they were both made for men larger than Anders and definitely larger than me. I rolled up the sleeves of my robes, praying that I would not trip on the hem as we went to meet Senator Quintus.

We both sat on the wide windowsill, side by side, some insignificant conversation fading into silence, when we heard a knock on the door. Exchanging glances, we both rose. I had no doubt that we were thinking the same thing: if it was Dagna on the other side of the door, she would have called out cheerfully to us.

“Come in,” Anders said, the unease in his voice filling the room with doubt.

The door opened, and a woman stepped into the room. She was undoubtedly a mage, due to the simple yet elegant robes that she wore, and the well-worn staff in her hand. For a moment, I saw that she had a gentle, almost motherly face and air about her – but that moment quickly passed as her gaze moved from me to Anders. Then, her thin, white eyebrows came together as she cast a withering scowl in his direction.

“Anders,” she said simply.

“Shit,” Anders muttered.

“You’re already friends.” I clasped my hands together. “That’s excellent. I find introductions to be so stilted in most cases.”

“Speaking of friends,” the woman continued, her voice almost too polite, “one of my dearest friends is looking for you. You might remember her: the Warden-Commander?”

“I know, I know that she is looking for me, among others. I know that you loathe the very ground that I walk upon,” Anders drawled, his own voice growing annoyed. “Can we get on with this?”

“I had hoped that her influence might temper you,” the woman said. I caught the slightest hint of disappointment in her tones. “I had hoped that the Grey Wardens would give you focus. A sense of purpose. Instead, you take her protection and throw it right back in her face, when she was the one person who could have kept the Templars off your back.”

“I’m not here for a lecture,” Anders said in a cold voice. “In case you didn’t notice, I’m not fourteen years old anymore.”

The woman pursed her lips. “I heard that Karl Thekla is dead. Was that your doing?”

Anders’ mood darkened into anger so very fast. “He was made Tranquil. It was his final request for me to bring his life to an end.”

The woman sighed heavily. “Tranquil live very full, comfortable lives in their new state.”

“On that,” spat Anders, “we disagree.” His lips shifted back and away from his teeth, a twisted sort of wince. He held a hand out in my direction. “Leandra, this is – “

“– Stop with the assumed names. Kindly.” The woman turned a venomous expression toward me. “Dagna might be fooled, but I am aware of who you truly are, as are most souls in Nevarra, the Free Marches or the Ferelden coast. I, on occasion, pay attention to the news of a town crier. You are Marian Hawke, the one wanted for the destruction of the Kirkwall Chantry and the murder of Grand Cleric Elthina.”

My words choked in my throat even as I spoke: “What? I didn’t -”

Anders covered his face with his hand, a twisted sound of frustration slipping past his lips. “Maker, _no_. She didn’t do it. I did it.” He pointed at me again. “She’s not even an accessory to the crime. She had no idea that I was going to do it.”

The woman seemed disarmed for the moment as she silently looked between the two of us. Then she sighed heavily, leaning forward to pinch the bridge of her nose. “I recall a mischievous scamp of a boy who, despite all of his failings, loved the Maker and his Bride.” Her voice sounded weaker, almost tired. “Is it your intention to have the Right of Annulment evoked in every single town and city across Thedas? Do you want to see the Chantry deem every last one of us as a threat and bring about our end?” She looked up at him. “Is this what you have become, Anders? Have you given away every last shred of your humanity?”

My mind filled with panic, only tempered slightly by the truth that lay in her words. I crossed the room and sat on a chair, staring at the window and the open sea beyond. This was no longer about saving Anders. I now had to save myself. I had to prove my innocence, and at the same time, risk an event that I realized all along could comprise an ultimate end. I would have to betray Anders to save myself.

No. There had to be another way.

There always was.

“I still serve Andraste and the Maker.” Anders’ voice sounded as if it came from far away. “I destroyed the Chantry so that there would be no neutrality, so that we mages, at last, could be free. The Chant is real. The perversion of the words of Andraste is also real. But, having done what I have done – I was wrong.” Pain seeped into his voice. “I should have done this another way. I could not stop myself, Enchanter. I was not in control of my actions once I decided the course.”

“Because of your Other. Now, you’ve damned the both of you.” Her voice remained soft.

“You should be grateful!” He shouted, his voice twisting dangerously. “By my actions, I have shaken the very foundations of the Chantry. The revolution is coming. All that dare stop mages from being a free people will suffer tenfold the horrors that they have visited upon us!” The voice changed, going deeper, beginning to reverberate, and I quickly looked in his direction. His eyes began to glow, and his hands clenched into fists.

I rose to my feet, intending on running between Anders and the Enchanter. Suddenly, something stopped me before I could even move – a warm, gentle feeling that enveloped me, cocooned me, and sapped away my unease. I felt somewhat tired. I wanted to lie down. I wanted to move toward the bed, climb into it, and curl up luxuriously among the thick duvet and blankets.

A small urge in my head worked down my spine, down my stomach and to both of my legs, reminding me that something had gone wrong. I had been placed under some kind of powerful enchantment, and I had to fight back.

I turned my head, finding myself unable to open my own eyes more than halfway. Right there, in the red suite, I could feel the Fade – so very powerful, like a beacon that reached through the Veil itself, and sought to split reality wide. The Enchanter held a hand toward me, palm toward me, maintaining the protection spell that held me fast. She moved toward Anders as if underwater, and at first, despite the peaceful expression on her face, I expected her to attack him.

Or for him to attack her.

“You will let Marian go,” Anders snarled, his eyes glowing brightly. His head moved from side to side as he clearly searched for his staff, but he seemed to have forgotten where he put it.

Fortunately, the staff was just behind me, leaning against a wall. Of course, I couldn’t exactly take it out of the equation, as I was under a powerful enchantment. “Let…me…go.” I pushed through the spell that bound me, forcing my mouth to move and for my lungs to squeeze out every syllable. “You are…making him…angrier…by threatening…me…”

Seeing that he couldn’t easily arm himself, Anders instead turned his attention back to the Enchanter. Instead of growing in anger, or in violence, both seemed to seep away. Objects in the room, not only the furniture but even the shadows and light themselves, bent and blurred in such a way that I began to wonder if we had, all three of us, been dragged into the Fade without knowing.

“Faith,” murmured Anders. “There is no place for you, here. I will take no comfort in you. You are wasting your time on trivialities.” His moment of calm ended as his lip turned up in a snarl, his eyebrows coming together. “Release Hawke, immediately, or you will regret it very much.” Raising one hand, he conjured a ball of lightning with a single word, and then held it in his hand, crackling, as if to illustrate his point.

The Enchanter did not seem at all threatened by this display of power. I heard her recite the incantation for a protective barrier, and a shield, at once, shimmered around her. “Anders,” she said in a soft voice. “You unfortunate, headstrong, foolish man.” For a second, I could swear that her body glowed with a gentle, warm white light. “What compelled you to allow yourself to be possessed?” I found myself astonished at her change in demeanor – she did not attack him, and she seemed to speak and treat him with sudden, great kindness. “I ask you to stand down. Marian is in no danger. She is under my protection.”

“Release her,” Anders said, his voice steely even as it echoed. The ball of lightning crackled angrily in his hand. “Release her, and I shall.”

The Enchanter allowed her hand to drop, and with it, the spell that held me fast. I fell to my knees, gasping for air, though I did not know why. I had been able to breathe well the entire time.

Dismissing the ball of lightning, Anders lowered his hand. I saw him waver as the world seemed to return to normal, shadows and light returning to their normal, ethereal states. Anders fell limply on his knees, gasping for air. A moment passed, and the blue glow from his eyes and body vanished.

The Enchanter dispelled her shield, and then slowly and almost painfully bent over, placing a gentle hand on Anders’ arm. “I think the Senator can help you a great deal. Come. He is waiting to meet you both.”

Anders made a point of pulling his arm from her grasp. “I’m getting better at controlling it,” he said as he tried to rise, stumbling as he did so.

I stood and made my way quickly to his side, offering him a shoulder to lean on as I cast a wordless look in the direction of the Enchanter.

“No,” she murmured in a very patient voice. “You’re not. It is giving you the illusion of control. You are very, very ill, Anders. So very ill that even a spirit healer such as yourself is unable to see the degree of the sickness.” Once again, she looked toward me. “By the way, my name is Wynne. I was once Anders’ teacher.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Hawke and Anders find aid from an unlikely source.

“I believe we can simply discard the illusion that you are two simple, typical apostates fleeing from the Chantry,” said Lucius. He sat before the hearth in the library of the tower, a strange, low-ceilinged room with books crammed into every last possible bit of space on the walls, except for the hearth and the single window, of course. “I’m no fool. Even if Wynne and I had not heard a town crier announcing the bounties on your heads, it is simple to see that you two are hardly typical.” He held a wooden pipe in one hand, which he occasionally took a few nips from, exhaling a long stream of grey smoke.

I studied the figure of Senator Lucius Quintus. In some respects, he appeared very typical of every Tevinter Magister I had ever seen – the strange hair, grey yet long and curled at the ends; the prominent, hooked nose; clean shaven and a thick brow. Yet I found myself staring at his eyes – they were a strange, bright blue, not unlike those belonging to Sebastian Vael. It was not just their color, but the life within them, the activity, the way that he looked between us and at Wynne, who sat apart from us, occasionally glancing up between dipping a delicate pen in an inkwell and making notes in a leather-bound journal. He was a man that used his hands as he talked, using a voice that sounded almost calm as he spoke with his heavy accent, yet with a clear command of the language that I had learned when I was very young.

He tilted his head. “I confess that I find myself at a loss. On one hand, as a member of the Senate, I am honorbound to obey the laws of whatever land I visit. I would be doing a great service to Nevarra to turn the pair of you in.”

“I knew that this was a bad idea,” said Anders as his entire body tensed.

“I’m not finished,” Lucius said in a gentle voice, raising a hand toward Anders in a gesture that called for silence. “The opportunity to give my research a…how shall I put this? A unique angle. Yes. It is too tempting to ignore, is it not?” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the arms of his overstuffed chair. “Would you do the same thing in my place? Ignore local laws and the very tenants of my elected position in the name of magical research?”

“I would ignore local laws if it meant protecting two mages from Chantry persecution,” Anders said in a dry voice.

“But you aren’t being persecuted, are you? You are being pursued, and not unjustly, may I add.” Lucius took a nip of his pipe, his gaze, again, moving between the two of us. “Would you protect a mage that had proven himself to be a danger to his own kind?”

“That’s a rather broad question, isn’t it?” Anders crossed his arms.

Lucius smiled around the stem of his pipe. “Quite right. Quite right.”

Anders steepled his fingers, looking at me with a searching expression for a long moment. I could tell that he was thinking of something that I was not likely to expect; I had seen that expression many, many times before at moments when he tended to surprise me.

It worried me.

Turning to Lucius, he said, “What if I were to tell you something that your Archon might like to hear? Something that might give him a political advantage?”

“My boy, the Archon is a doddering old fool, and in a little under two years, he will no longer be the Archon.” Lucius’s smile vanished. “I have recently gained a great deal of favor in the Senate for…how can I put this? I cleaned up a few rather nasty international incidents caused high-ranking Magisters. I soothed the ruffled feathers of the crowned heads of Thedas. I am capable of magic of an entirely different sort – the incantations of a throne room, or even a state dinner party. I, as it is said in Ferelden, ‘get around’.” He waved a hand in time with the cadence of his words. “I know that the Imperium cannot regain ground while succumbing to our insular tendencies. We, too, must grace Thedas’s stage.”

“You’re going to be the next Archon,” I said. It was the first time I had spoken since I entered the room.

“Correct.” Lucius nodded at me before returning his attention to Anders. “Therefore, if there is anything that you wish to tell the Archon, his ears are my ears. Or, in this case, the Archon’s ears are mine. It is a slightly different thing.”

“Markus von Reiniger is going to become king of the Anderfels,” said Anders. I watched his posture change even as he spoke. His chin jutted out, and his shoulders slipped backward, putting him in a stronger, straighter posture. “But that’s not what I want to tell you. It’s a statement of fact. You must be thrilled that you will have the Knight-Champion of the Templars in the Anderfels on the throne.”

“I will be watching him very, very carefully, if that is what you mean.” Lucius, in turn, sat up straighter, his pipe dangling from two fingers. “I do not trust that he will leave well enough alone. That is, I believe, given my past dealings with him, he will be tempted to invade the Imperium to demonstrate the might of his pathetic, impoverished nation. The White Divine would be impressed were he to defeat us. Which, he won’t. Certainly you have something better to offer me than that, Anders?” Lucius smiled. “I am listening.”

I noticed that Wynne was not writing in her journal, but was staring in our direction, her pen in her hand, hovering just above the inkwell.

“My name isn’t Anders,” my intended husband said. “I am Frederick von Reiniger.”

It wasn’t the answer Lucius was looking for. The smile turned to an expression of unguarded, unrefined shock – eyes wide, mouth opening slightly for a second, just enough to show the tops of his very white, very straight teeth. I drew a certain amount of quiet glee from the fact that, with so few words, Anders had managed to disarm the practiced, poised Senator.

“He is telling the truth.” It was Wynne that broke the silence. Setting her pen in the inkwell, she stood slowly and moved toward us. “When his magical powers manifested, his father sent him to the Circle in the Anderfels. He escaped twice and turned up in the custody of First Enchanter Irving of the Ferelden Circle. Irving convinced King Gottfried to allow him to stay in Ferelden.” She looked between the two of us before turning to face Lucius. “I was one of three Enchanters made privy to his true origins, two of which died in the Circle upheaval ten years ago.”

Lucius’s gaze fell on Anders. He composed himself, the neutral expression returning to his face. Then, accompanied by a gentle wave of one hand, he said something very rapidly in Ander.

Anders replied, and I could not stop a small smile from creeping onto my lips. I had heard him drop a few words hear and there, but never heard him speak several sentences at a time. The rolling syllables, spoken with his voice, danced alluringly in my ears.

“Upper-class Hossberg accent, central dialect, usage of local slang. It is certainly possible.” The calm smile returned to Lucius’s face, though it seemed tinged with amusement. “You have no idea how to be a king, do you?”

“If King Alistair can learn, so can I,” Anders said, his hands resting again at his sides.

“King Alistair was a popular choice put forth during very desperate times by a heroine worthy of legend.” Lucius paused to take a puff of his pipe. “You a legitimate son, but a castoff, a mage, a terrorist, and an abomination, asking to rule a nation where the word of the Maker is not disputed. Are you not also a former Grey Warden, or have I heard incorrectly?”

“You are correct.” Anders raised his eyebrows.

“So you will be dead within a few short years. You should have already begun your attempts to produce an heir.” Lucius cast a critical gaze in my direction.

I raised my eyebrows at him, but didn’t say anything. I didn’t feel that anything needed to be said.

Lucius tilted his head toward me, but continued to speak to Anders. “Champion Hawke is not your wife, though. Yet. Pray you are soon successful, and that you are more fortunate than I. Pray that the Maker will give you a son. He gave me three daughters. I spent a fortune in dowries. Tell me, what do you mean to do with your degenerated nation if you were to get it?”

“I will create a nation where mages can live free of the Chantry,” Anders said on the heels of Lucius’s words.

Lucius chuckled. “How endearing. You do know that even in the Imperium, which is ruled by our kind, we are not entirely free?” His expression darkened, and he leaned back in his chair, resting against the thick, richly-embroidered back. “We still must suffer the persistence of the Templars and a deeply, terribly corrupted Chantry. The Black Divine himself can be easily bought. Unfortunately, his preferred gifts tend to be elf children under the age of twelve.” His lips drew back in a grimace. “There are still Circles.”

“And slaves,” added Anders.

“Slavery is an institution to which I do not subscribe, but as Archon, I will not touch it, either.” Lucius nodded his head. “I have learned that it is rather unwise to make an enemy out of your own hired help. I pay my servants very well for their discretion, and they do not wag their tongues when someone gets the impulse to see me discredited among my colleagues. But we are not talking about the Imperium or the issue of slavery; we are talking about the Anderfels.”

Anders moved to sit in the chair opposite of Lucius. “Why don’t we talk about the Imperium? I might be able to help tip the scales of the Black Chantry.”

“Greater men than you have been unable to do that, Prince Frederick. Wynne, could you call Dagna? I want my lunch.” Lucius started to say something to Anders, but paused, watching Wynne leave the room. As soon as the door closed behind her, he rose, went swiftly to it, and locked it with a quickly recited spell.

“I have an idea…you just gave it to me, Frederick.” Lucius did not turn back to us, but remained facing the door. “I should not want Wynne to hear of any portion of it, however, as I have no doubt that she will not understand my intent. I believe there is a way that you can aid the Imperium in a very large way, my friend.” Something dark crept into his voice. “I will stand with you. I will aid you. When you and I complete our work, I will march with you to the border of the Anderfels with an army of fifty thousand mages. It will be a force that cannot be resisted – not by the army your brother commands, not if he were able to recruit every farmer and blacksmith from Weisshaupt to the Wandering Hills.”

“There is always a catch.” I sat down in the chair that Anders had moved, feeling relieved to be off my feet.

“Yes. There is.” Lucius, at last, turned to look at us. I could easily see the intensity in his face. “As I said, I just thought of this plan. I have not had time to think of the details. You two cannot deny that what I stand to gain from this is much, much more easily acquired than what you might gain. The brunt, as it were, of the work will be yours. However, without me, I do not think you two would have as much success.”

“Certainly, I’m not going to be left behind as the mere future queen of the Anderfels.” I tried to make the phrase sound charming, perhaps amusing, but in truth, it was the very thing I had been thinking all along, and it was starting to touch on my deepest nerves.

“I would not be so stupid as to leave you out of the equation, Champion Hawke,” replied Lucius with a smile and a small bow. “You see, if the Imperium attacks the Anderfels first, for any reason, all of the Anderfels’ allies will be sure to join in the fun. Fortunately, Orlais and Ferelden are kicking dirt at one another like a pair of schoolboys. Antiva won’t care unless there’s something in it for them, and Rivain isn’t organized enough. Nevarra will need to be dealt with.”

“You want for me to be an ambassador,” I said. The idea of travel, coupled with the possibility of danger, did sound intriguing. It sounded better if I didn’t have to pay for it, though there was the high possibility that I’d not be travelling with Anders by my side. “I can do that. I’ve already met King Alistair before. We had a decent conversation.” Then, unbidden, thoughts of Sebastian’s parting words wormed their way into my thoughts, and I frowned. “I have a feeling that Starkhaven may be a threat if they discover who Prince Frederick truly is.”

“Pah.” Lucius waved a hand in a dismissive manner. “They have no more than a few hundred in their armies. They are no threat.”

“Why raise flags when you can use one trained assassin?” Anders cast an uncomfortable look in my direction. “Hawke has a point.”

“Fall afoul of Prince Sebastian, did you?” Lucius raised his eyebrows. “He is easily dealt with. All you two must do is say the word. The Pentaghast family, however, are a group of rather militant and brilliant leaders. They must be convinced. Courted, like a lover, taken into bed, and stroked. Gently. But we will speak of this when more details fall into place. It will not do to make Enchanter Wynne suspicious.” Turning back to the door, he unlocked it, then returned to his chair. “Frederick – may we speak as equals, which, in truth, we are?”

“Of course.” Anders and I had been staring at once another since the discussion of Sebastian being dealt with began. His attention did not divert. “Call me Anders.”

“Thank you, Anders,” Lucius continued. “To the original reason for your visit. I will need to perform a full physical examination on you, including the taking of several blood samples. As you are a spirit healer, yourself, I do not object to giving you full disclosure as to what I intend to do, and what I am looking for.” As the door opened and Wynne quietly slipped inside, he gave her a simple nod of acknowledgement. “In my younger days at the North Circle, I was trained as a spirit healer. Though I demonstrated a great deal of talent for healing magic, I confess that I found the school of magic to be rather boring.”

“Boring?” Anders raised his eyebrows. “The Arcane is boring. Healing is always changing and improving. We are learning more and more about the anatomies of greater creatures every single year.”

Wynne nodded in his direction. “For once, Anders, we agree on something.”

“Come. My laboratory is on the fourth floor.” Lucius gestured toward the door. “Many of the various studies of magic that are outlawed in other lands aren’t illegal in the Imperium.”

“Such as blood magic and necromancy.” Anders frowned as he stood.

“I think I know where this is heading,” I murmured, my gaze moving to Lucius. “Would you be trying to tell us that you are a blood mage?” I walked with Anders toward the door.

Lucius clicked his tongue. “My dear Hawke, I would hope that you would not think me so foolish to use blood magic among the most powerful of the Fade demons. Would a Grey Warden go to battle darkspawn and toss away his armor just as the horde approached? My work is very dangerous.”

“I assure you, Hawke, I would not be here if I had seen any evidence of blood magic in Senator Quintus’s scholarly works,” Wynne said, smiling at me in a somewhat comforting fashion. “After seeing what blood magic did to the Ferelden Circle, I would not consider any mage who resorted to its use to be any friend of mine.”

“We agree on more than one thing,” Anders muttered as he moved out into the stairwell. “Where was I while the Circle was being destroyed? On the run, I think.”

“It is a good thing that you missed it,” Wynne said, her gaze turning to him. “Though, we could have used your help with healing the wounded afterwards. You were always a brilliant triage physician.”

“Did you just give me a compliment?” Anders paused in mid-step out of mere shock.

“I give credit where credit is due.” Wynne’s tones darkened somewhat. “It’s too bad that you spent more energy on pranks, escapes, and antagonizing others rather than working on your craft.” She looked to me. “I still have some of his scholarly papers. His insights into healing theory showed a great deal of promise.”

“Now, that’s not true,” said Anders. “I spent equal parts of energy on pranks, escapes, and research. Antagonizing others came naturally. It’s a gift.”

Lucius led the way up the staircase. “I knew it was wise to bring you on, Enchanter Wynne. You have exceeded my expectations at every turn, and the fact that you know one of my subjects personally is indeed a bonus.” He paused at a closed door with no knob or any sort of keyhole. Resting his fingertips on the bare wood for a moment, he only withdrew his hand once the door began to glow. “I’ll change the incantation so that the door will recognize your hand, Wynne.”

I was surprised to see that her cheeks had gained a small amount of pink. “I try my best. You were wise to be persistent with me. I was not sure I could fully give my trust to a Tevinter mage.”

Lucius pushed open the door and stepped inside the laboratory, pausing for a moment to smile back at her. “Ah, we’re not all bad. I should hope to change your mind about most of my countrymen. Most of them, mind.”

Wynne chuckled, her blush deepening. “There are bad mages in every group. The Ferelden Circle is proof of that.”

Anders and I looked at one another. I could see that he was trying his best not to laugh.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Anders discovers that his condition is so much worse than he ever imagined.

Lucius was frowning when I looked over at him, but the frown quickly faded. “You’re underweight, dehydrated, and your blood is missing critical minerals.” He raised the small vial that he held up to a candle, swirling the red-brown blood within. “Have you drawn your own blood since your Joining, Anders?”

Anders lay on a table, wearing nothing but a lightweight blue sheet and his smallclothes. “A few times,” he replied. “It never looked muddy like that before.”

“You pricked yourself?” I stood near his left shoulder, resting my fingertips on his bare skin. “Is this what spirit healers do for fun?”

“Oh yes,” Wynne replied without looking up from her journal as she hastily made a few notes. “We test our own urine, as well. It’s comforting, like reading a good book.”

“Is she serious?” I looked down at Anders, searching his face for the answer.

Lucius cast a spell that I did not recognize, and his vial glowed green for a moment. “You’re showing signs of lyrium poisoning on top of everything else. It’s as if your blood is thick with Fade energy.”

Anders sat up straight on the table, the sheet falling around his waist. “What? How?”

My mind filled with ideas, none of which I liked. “Could Justice be altering the way your body works?” The question was directed at Anders, but I looked straight at Lucius, hoping that I wasn’t right.

“I’m not sure if it’s that simple.” Lucius swirled the blood around again, and cast another spell on the vial. “I’ve seen abominations at very advanced states of infection. Yes, their bodies are very different than ours. But this high concentration of Fade energy –“ He trailed off, looking at Anders for a moment, before continuing, “ – you shouldn’t even be alive.”

“Justice started off as a spirit,” I noted, “then started to become Vengeance, which could be demonic presence, or at least a corrupted one. Perhaps –“

“Wait a moment. I want to see something. I have a theory.” Wynne rose suddenly, laid aside her pen, and moved to the table that held the medical instruments. She chose a syringe – itself a nasty thing with a needle that looked entirely too thick to me – inserted a vial with a swift click, and began to roll up her right sleeve. “I would bet that his blood is unlike anything we’ve seen before, Lucius. It would want to be a hybrid, but with the darkspawn corruption, which we know to be highly absorbent –“

“ – I’m absorbing lyrium.” Anders looked down at the dark bruises covering his right arm, each from a needle, each representing a wound that had been healed. “But, wait. I’ve used lyrium for quick energy since I became a Warden. Lots of times – even since I merged with Justice. It still affects me.”

“I want to meet the spirit.” Lucius set the blood vial in a small rack and rose from his table. “Perhaps it can shed some light on our findings.” He opened a small box and took out three bottles. “Wynne, as soon as you are ready…”

Wynne tied a small cord around her upper arm, pulled it tight, and turned the needle on herself, inserting it into her forearm. “His blood should show some similarities with mine,” she murmured as the vial filled with healthier-looking, bright red blood. “I want to test the lyrium content of my own blood. I haven’t used a lyrium potion in a month.”

Lucius nodded his head. “Then, there should be only trace elements remaining. There are always small amounts of lyrium in a mage’s bloodstream.” He set a potion next to Wynne’s arm, and extended one toward Anders.

“Wait. What about me?” I asked. “You’ll want me in there, too. I’ve had experience with Vengeance.”

“Absolutely not. Quite unnecessary,” Lucius replied with a shake of his head. “I do not want to put you in danger, Hawke.”

“If you die in the Fade, you will become Tranquil.” Wynne removed the needle, the cord, and recited a low-level healing spell. “I know that you want to be with him. I understand the reasons.” Her voice turned gentle as her gaze moved from the vial of blood in her hand to my face. “Nevertheless, we do not wish to place you in undue danger.”

“We are equipped to deal with the more violent Fade spirits.” Lucius offered me a smile, which didn’t make me feel any better. “Don’t worry. We will try our best not to provoke a confrontation.”

“Come now - I’ve killed plenty of demons,” I pointed out. In truth, part of me could understand why they meant to leave me behind. I wanted to go to offer Anders moral support, and some other support in the form of a barrage of nasty fireballs if need be. But I knew that I would also be in the way. “Anders was there. He fought them, too.”

“You know how vulnerable one can become when the demon has a personal connection.” Anders reached out, his hands coming to rest on my elbows. His face did the pleading for him even before he spoke. “Please, beloved. Wait here. I will return to you. I promise.”

Defeated, I stepped away from him, went to the laboratory’s one and only comfortable chair, and sat on it, propping up my feet on a footstool.

Anders watched me, and as I sat, continued to stare in my direction. Uncorking the bottle, he tipped the contents into his mouth, swallowed, and lay back on the table. With a tug, he pulled the sheet around his shoulders. “It’s a bit cold, you know,” he said in a quiet voice, his eyes flickering closed.

I watched his body relax, as did Wynne and Lucius. Then, they moved to two different portions of the room, not speaking as they did so, each holding thoughtful expressions on their own faces. Wynne lay down on the chaise in front of the small fireplace and drank her potion, while Lucius took his own while seated at his desk in the ornately carved wooden chair.

Soon, I was the only one in the lab who remained awake.

I was tempted to try to sleep, but I knew that the likelihood of me ending up in the same portion of the Fade was fairly low. Instead, like a child, I found myself pouting. Glowering at a portion of the floor where the rock had cracked in a strange circular pattern. I wondered what had caused such damage.

I wondered when I had become obsolete.

No. This was not about me. I would be in the way. I had to face the fact that as much as I wanted to be supportive of Anders, this was a time to get out of the way and let the experts do the work, as it were.

Ten minutes of nothing passed before my stomach broke the silence with a mighty growl. Anders remained quiet and calm beneath his single sheet. Wynne murmured something unintelligible and shook her head a few times. I found myself astonished that Lucius remained seated with his head erect, hands resting in his lap, as if he was meditating on a magical conundrum rather than asleep.

I decided to leave them and find something to eat. It wasn’t a difficult decision.

When I returned about twenty minutes later, my stomach filled with a thick ham sandwich with horseradish, I did not find the sleepers as peaceful as I had left them. Wynne now muttered entire fragments of healing spells, while Lucius clenched and unclenched his fists. Anders, however, remained very still. Only the rising and falling of his chest with each breath told me that he was alive at all.

The sight caused me to immediately regret wolfing down the sandwich and chasing it with a wedge of Ander sharp and a small jug of cider. My stomach churned as I crossed the laboratory swiftly, moving toward Anders with the blood rushing in my ears.

As I reached out to touch one of his hands, the sound of movement in another corner of the room drew my attention instead. Lucius had awakened, and was rubbing his eyes with the palms of his hands.

“That was interesting,” he murmured in a voice that suggested that whatever had taken place in the Fade was anything but boring. Immediately, he took up his quill, dipped it in ink, and began to write in the leatherbound journal in the center of his desk.

Wynne sat upright. “Senator, are you alright?” She asked as she rose from the chaise.

“I’m fine.” Lucius did not look up from his journal. I could not read the words that I strained to see as he wrote them; his notes were written entirely in Arcanum. “Not a scratch on my soul, I assure you. Give me just a moment to note my observations.”

“What happened?” I demanded, noticing the panic in my own words even as I said them. I looked to Anders, seeing that he still did not stir. “Is he alright?”

Walking over to Anders, Wynne slid her fingers over his right wrist, checking his pulse. “Give him a moment. He was under considerable strain in the Fade.”

“Strain?” I took the free hand, staring at his face even as I prayed for a reaction – any reaction – from Anders.

I did not have to wait long. Gently, he pulled his hand from my grasp as he sat up on the table. Bending his knees, he rested his elbows on them, putting his face in his hands.

“What happened?” I looked between Wynne and Lucius, and at last, to Anders. “Could you three be so kind to at least answer one of my questions? Any of you? One of you?” Panic thickened in my voice. “Did Vengeance attack the three of you in the Fade?”

“There is no Vengeance. Not really. Not anymore.” Anders said, his face hidden, his voice muffled by his hands. “Lucius, I didn’t know.”

“That much was obvious,” Lucius murmured, still writing as he spoke. “I do not think that you could have known the depths of the corruption to your own soul. Even as a casual outside observer, I could not measure it.”

“Can someone tell me just what the Void is going on?” Heat rose to my face as my gaze fell hard on the Tevinter mage.

“At first, I operated under the assumption that Anders knew about the connection between himself, Justice, and Vengeance. I made an attempt to sever their connection with no undue risk of Tranquility,” Lucius set down his quill and looked toward me. “There is no Justice. There is no Vengeance. There is evidence that both were present in Anders’ soul, yes, but both have been consumed. Both spirits, however, left behind something that may have saved Anders, but not for long.”

“They created a chamber within Anders’ soul,” Wynne continued. She left the table, moved toward a table that held clean mugs and a teapot, and chose a mug. “They wanted to contain yet another, even more powerful spirit within him. They knew that if this spirit were to destroy Anders’ soul, they would be all trapped inside, all in eternal torment.”

“This is about that voice that you heard.” I grasped Anders’ bare arm again, wanting nothing more for him to look at me, to respond to me. “The cruelty on the beach – it was the other spirit.” I looked between Wynne and Lucius again. “Where did it come from? What is it? The other spirit, I mean.”

Lucius left his writing desk and moved toward me. I could see from the expression on his face that he was using the time in walking across the room to carefully consider his words, to think over what he had seen, and trying his best to describe it all.

When he spoke, he crossed his arms, looking me directly in the eyes. “I confess that I have never seen its likeness. Anders was correct on one thing – there is a piece of the Fade inside of him, inside of this world. However, the reasons for this are most disturbing, the results highly unusual. In time, this chamber built by both Vengeance and Justice will be destroyed by the other – the Beast – within. Inside, the Beast feeds on Anders, as it consumed both Justice and Vengeance before him. Its food is every negative emotion, every shred of self-doubt that Anders feels.”

“The Beast is more than a demon. More than a spirit.” Anders looked up from his hands, but stared across the room at a blank wall. “It is a constant connection with the Fade. It is meant to stay contained. If the chamber is destroyed – when it is destroyed - the Veil will not just tear, but gape wide.”

“I saw this Beast.” Wynne had filled the cup with water, and now brought it back to Anders, pressing it in one of his hands. “It is like no demon I have ever seen, none that I have studied or read about in all of my days. It is a pure force of destruction. It does not love or hate. It only craves its release.”

It was as if my mind, as it absorbed the news presented to me, latched on to certain phrases, connected to certain thoughts and memories. In this connection, I felt weaker. Helpless. “Anders,” I said, “something like that doesn’t just…get there on its own. Tell me that you know how this…thing…possessed you.”

What had he done? There was more. So much more. More lies, more deceit, more risks Anders had taken with his very life that he had simply neglected to tell me. What demons had he made pacts with, even after all of his cruelty to Merril? Was there an end to his hypocrisy?

I should not have been so quick to judge him. What he would tell me next was something I would have never expected.

He stared at his lap. “Lucius has constructed a theory. I think it is a sound one, but it means something that I’m…” He trailed off for a moment, making a very small gasping noise. His shoulders shifted uncomfortably. Then he continued: “I’ve been an abomination all of this time. Since I was a child. Since I started showing evidence of magical talent.”

“Wait,” I said quickly. “I don’t understand. When you were a child, you made a pact…?”

“No!” Anders’ face drew tight, painfully tight, as he at last looked at me. “I made a pact with no demon. I didn’t ask for any of this. I would have never merged with Justice had I known.”

“Help me to understand, then.” My voice was trembling. I wished that there was a chair close to Anders’ examining table. My knees felt as though they would give.

“I don’t understand it myself, Marian.” Anders’ face grew red, and for a moment, I could have sworn I caught the faintest glimmer of the blue Fade-glow in his eyes. “How can I explain something that has no explanation? There is no tome that I have ever read that remotely describes a possession like this!”

Lucius tilted his head slightly. “I have seen incidents of severe mental anguish causing tears in the Veil. The only logical conclusion is that your father –“

“Don’t!” Anders’ head snapped toward Lucius, his teeth bared. “That is not for you to tell her!”

I didn’t know what to say anymore. I didn’t know that anything that I could possibly say would contribute anything to the discussion at all.

When Anders looked at me again, I did not recognize the expression on his face. I wasn’t sure that I recognized him at all. He had become a different person. A foreigner. Someone trapped in another land, in another time, and someone no longer in the room with the three of us.

"My father did not deliver me to the Templars a few days after I burned down our barn." His voice sounded hard. Cold. I had never heard Anders, a man filled with passion and emotion, sound so Tranquil. "Six months passed. Six months when my father attempted, with the aid of the White Divine, to purge me of the very things that the Maker had given me when I was born." His eyes locked with mine. I wanted to look away, oh Maker, I wanted to flee from this, this was just too much to hear all at once – but I could not. "There is a cell in the dungeons of the royal palace. Inside of this cell is a tear in the Veil so great and terrible that the cell has been permanently sealed – walled up with bricks and mortar then covered completely in runes. This is, after half a year, what I left behind – the product of my anger and pain."

Suddenly, it was all too much – losing my mother, my home, Anders’ betrayal, Anders’ lies, the Chantry exploding, Carver leaving, and now this – all of this, all at once. I did not want to feel anymore. I closed my eyes. I was empty. There was nothing left.

“It’s over. I’m finished.” There, in the darkness, the sadness returned to his voice. It was emotion. It was something that wasn’t so lifeless and dead. “I cannot do all of these things that people want for me to do, and fight a war within my own mind. I can’t free the mages when I am, alone, the greatest danger that they may ever know. I cannot lead the Anderfels. The obstacles are insurmountable. If I take my life now, my body will not be able to sustain the Beast. It will die along with me. I have already put so many people in danger. I must do the right thing.”

In that darkness, my mouth moved, and I spoke words moved by my soul, and not by my conscious will:

“By the Void, you won’t.”

All at once, in one single second, I found myself unwilling to declare an end – to Anders’ life, or the fight for it. I knew by mere instinct that nothing was so black-and-white. Lines could be crossed. Rules could be broken. Something could be done that had been done before, or we could find a new way to do it.

There had to be a way. There always was.

“I am not yet willing to give up, either.” I heard resolution in Lucius’s voice. “Not yet. It is true – I have never dealt with a Fade creature like the Beast, but I intend to find a way to cure you. I intend to start the treatments today, if you will allow it.”

I opened my eyes and rose to my feet. “Anders,” I said. “Are you listening? Your life is no longer only yours anymore. You are not allowed to die.” I took both of his wrists in my hands, held them tightly, and looked directly, fearlessly, into his face. “I am not letting you escape. I am not letting you kill yourself so you can avoid your problems. You will live, because we will find a way of defeating this Beast. You will live until the taint in your blood decides that it’s your time to die. You will live – for your people, for the mages, and for the new world that you dream of building.”

His face changed. I cannot describe it even as I look back, through the years, and remember how I could tell that we had managed to change his mind. Something changed in the way that he held himself, how he looked at me, the gaze softening and growing vulnerable, and perhaps even frightened.

His eyes shifted, resting on Lucius. “Alright,” he said in a soft, weak voice. “What do I do first?”

Lucius stood up straighter, crossing his arms, as a very satisfied look crossed his face. “You will do what I tell you to do. You will eat every meal, drink what I give you, sleep when I tell you, and practice. Read. Learn. Train. Prepare.” He suddenly turned and swept toward his desk. “I am going to write a letter. How would you two like to be married by the Black Divine himself?”

“By the Black Divine?” I blinked, astonished at the sudden shift in the discussion. Then, realization set in. “I don’t mean any offense, but I’m not sure that’s a good idea.” I glanced at Anders, and continued, “Our marriage wouldn’t be recognized by the White Chantry, which means that –“

“You’re mages,” Lucius said as he sat on the great chair at his desk. “The White Divine can choose to not recognize your marriage if she so wanted. I won’t even mention Frederick’s popularity with the Chantry right now, something that the Black Divine will overlook if I tell him to.”

“Good point.” I honestly did not know how to respond to that.

“No.” Anders shook his head. “That is very kind, Lucius, but the people of the Anderfels won’t recognize the marriage, either.” Sliding off the table, he tucked the sheet around his waist. “If given time, perhaps –“

“ – Perhaps you’ve already forgotten the part where I asked you to do as I say, Anders.” Dipping a quill in a bottle of ink, Lucius began to write on a sheet of parchment. “I must ask also for your trust in this. I can’t yet explain a plan that is not fully recognized, but I will tell you all in good time, mark my words.” He glanced up momentarily, looking between Anders and myself. “If it is the financing of a state wedding that worries you, don’t despair. I will arrange everything. Consider it a wedding present.” His smile did not comfort me. “I think I still have the address of my late wife’s dressmaker. He’ll think of something fetching yet befitting the prowess of the Anderfels’ future queen.”

Lucius’s gaze turned directly on Anders. Pausing for a moment, I saw his tongue dart across his lips, and then he said something in Ander, the expression on his face, and the intonation in his voice suggesting that he was asking several questions.

Anders clearly didn’t like what he heard. He pressed his lips together, looked at the ground for a moment, raised his head, then shook it. His reply was short and clearly negative.

Saying a few brief words, Lucius tilted the hand that held his pen, then returned to a language I could understand: “In the meantime, Wynne, let’s treat our Prince Frederick for lyrium poisoning. If this Beast is using the levels of lyrium in Anders’ bloodstream to transform his body, or use it to connect to the Fade, or whatever, we’ll make it as difficult for it as possible. One vial of bloodwort extract per hour for the first twelve hours, then one every two hours for the next twelve. One every six until the levels in his blood return to normal, or close to normal. We’ll sleep in shifts and watch my hourglass.”

Anders raised his eyebrows. “You expect me to eat while taking bloodwort extract? That will ensure that my stomach remains empty.”

Wynne crossed the room toward a large cabinet that stretched from the floor to the ceiling. “I’ll brew something that should alleviate the less than pleasant side effects of bloodwort extract. Do you have a preference, Anders?”

He sighed heavily, shaking his head. “Elfroot leaf tea should make the nausea and vomiting less severe, but I can’t think of anything that will counteract the vertigo. I’ve never seen anything work in any of my patients suffering from lyrium poisoning.”

“I might know something that will work.” Wynne opened the cabinet, chose a small wooden box, and looked inside. “We’ll need more bloodwort extract to do a complete treatment. A lot more. We’d best get started then.” She held up a small vial of blood red liquid, which she extended in Anders’ direction. “I need some spindleweed thorns ground in this silver mortar. Thirty or more. Would you be willing to help me, Anders?”

His sigh, again, was both resigned and painful. “I might as well, until I fall over from the dizziness.”

“Let me do it.” I crossed the room, speaking without thinking and moving toward Wynne before I could take it back. “I need something to occupy myself.”

It was preferable, after all, to pacing the floors, wondering what Lucius was up to, and what were these plans that he was dangling over our heads. I found myself not entirely certain that any of those things were in our best interests.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Hawke has a foreboding dream, and she and Lucius make plans to drum up support for Anders to reclaim his throne.

Once Anders began to take doses of the extract, he fell so severely ill that he could not descend the stairs to the red suite without nearly taking a tumble down them. Lucius and Dagna carried a mattress into Lucius’s laboratory, placed it before the fireplace, and left my unfortunate husband-to-be there, sipping elfroot tea and vomiting into one of Dagna’s prized mixing bowls.

Taking turns, one by one, the others sat in vigil by Anders’ side. Dagna brought his dinner, which did not remain in his stomach for long. Wynne brought some chicken broth and toasted bread, which he ate, then promptly fell into a heavy sleep for the remaining half an hour before his next dosage of the bitter, blood red medicine.

I knew that it was late into the night, well past the dinner hour, perhaps into the early morning hours. Clouds obscured the moon outside, hiding any indication of the true hour from my eyes. I took the mixing bowl to the red suite, cleaned it, and brought it back to the lab. When I returned, I heard Anders speaking in weak, hushed tones as Wynne sat on the mattress, taking his pulse.

“You don’t have to stay here,” Anders told her. “I’ll be fine.”

“You have a fever – a clear indication of dehydration.” Wynne uncorked a bottle of the extract and placed it in his waiting hand. “I’ll bring you some water. You must try to drink it.”

Neither of them was aware of my presence. Quietly, I stepped in between two bookshelves, bending over just enough so that I could glimpse them from among the many stacks of dusty books.

“I’ll try my best.” He shivered, his voice sounding resigned. Draining the vial dry, he handed it back to her.

“I think that there’s something that you should know.” Wynne held the empty vial in one hand, but it was as if she had already forgotten about it. “We – the Enchanters, the First Enchanter, and I – did not know what happened to you. We did not know what your father did to you. If Karl knew, he did not report it to us, and he should have.”

“He didn’t know.” I wished that I could have seen Anders’ face. I could tell nothing from his voice, and the bedclothes that Wynne tugged around his neck hid most of his head from my point of view. “What would have been the point? It’s not as though you could have gone to Father’s own guards and had him arrested for assault. There is no justice for mages, and there was none for me.”

“I’m not sure, but you are right – there is nothing that we could have done.” She looked away from him, and toward the window that portrayed the moonless, starless night. “I am sorry. It was terrible.”

“Yes,” Anders replied. “It was.”

Silence fell between them. Hugging her own thin chest, Wynne slowly rose from the mattress. “I have been thinking about our plight a great deal. Your ideas are hardly original, you know. In fact, you are in good company – some of Thedas’s most respected mages have argued for separatism. It’s not an easy answer, as, no doubt, you have realized. Having a country of all our own is problematic in itself. Have you wondered what would happen if you, as king of a nation of mages, fathered a child born without magical talent? Not every child of a mage, even two mages, becomes a mage themselves.”

“Well, I may not live long enough to see him or her grow much past childhood,” Anders pointed out. “It doesn’t matter, though. I have the chance to teach him or her – ugh –“ He turned over onto his side, his back to me as he curled up. “Here we go again.”

“Breathe slowly.” Wynne turned to look at his groaning, panting form. “Slowly, now. The concentrated spindleweed should start to work any moment now. It takes an hour or two to dissolve in the body fully, but once it does, it is quite effective.”

“Ugh.” I heard Anders gag a few times, followed by a string of coughs. “I think I’ve broken a rib from the amount of vomiting I’ve done tonight.” Pressing a hand against his side, he cast a diagnostic spell. “Yes. I did. Fifth rib is cracked on the chest side.”

Wynne didn’t move to help him. “You are not vomiting, though. There’s progress.”

Anders recited another spell, rolled over onto his back, and groaned. “Aren’t high doses of pure spindleweed thorns considered toxic?”

“Oh.” A smile touched Wynne’s lips. “I see that you remember something from my lessons. Yes, they can be. Fortunately, bloodwort is, as you know, an absorbent of poisons.” The smile vanished, and she added, “You never answered my question, you know. I’m not going to allow you to avoid it, either.”

“Taking advantage of your captive audience, then?” Anders’s words came out as one, long groan. “Fine. As I was trying to say, I will teach him or her that magic is a natural part of our world, just as rocks, or plants.” I could see that he stared at the ceiling, but could not see what exactly about it seemed to occupy his attention. “Marian is very talented with elemental magic. You know me – my best fireball can cause a mild sunburn at best. Marian can’t heal a papercut. Even among mages, the Maker ensures that we each have different talents. We’re all good at something different, so that we can help one another, and so that life doesn’t get boring.”

I found myself smiling. I hoped that I would see Wynne do the same, but she did not.

“I confess that I cannot help but blame myself,” she said in a soft voice.

“For what?” Anders tilted up his head in an attempt to see her.

“The fact that you’ve become what you are,” Wynne replied. “I was one of your teachers. I could have led you down a different path. I do not like the man that you have become, Frederick. You are too old to alter your course, and you’ve done far too much. I will pray that you will be a good king for your people.” She uttered a weighty sigh. “I will pray that either Lucius or I will be able to heal you of this Beast. I will pray for your soul, that somehow, in some way, you will live the remainder of your life humbled, remembering that it is by the Maker’s hand that you still live, even after all that you have done.”

“The Maker is keeping me alive so that another person can fulfill his or her purpose by killing me,” Anders said in a dull voice. “It is the only logical conclusion I’ve come to, something that makes sense of everything that has been placed on my shoulders.”

“Who can know the Maker’s intentions?” Wynne started toward the door to the laboratory, and I shrank back against the wall, stepping into a deep shadow. “Do you need another blanket?”

“If you hate me so much, Enchanter, why are you caring for me?” Anders craned his neck again, moving so that he could see her, though he winced as he did so. “Why are you praying for me? Why does it matter what I do?”

“We are healers, Anders. It is what we do.” Wynne clasped her hands together. “We bring health and comfort to the ill. We don’t harm one another, not unless we have no other choice.”

“Choice? We have no choice.” Anders had propped himself up on one arm, and now looked as though he was ready to rise from the mattress despite the sweat on his forehead and the dampness of his hair. “How could you be so blind?”

Wynne shook her head. “I do not hate you, Anders. I pity you. Marian seems to be a very kind soul, and her devotion to you is obvious. I pity her, as well, and fear for her.”

“We don’t need your pity,” Anders snapped, resting back on the bed. Closing his eyes, he pulled the blankets around his neck. I saw his jaw moving as his teeth chattered.

Wynne stood in the doorway for a long time, her hands still clasped. A few times, she opened her mouth to say something, and then closed it. Then, after a moment of silence, she bowed her head, let out a long exhale, and turned her back to Anders. “I’ll bring you another blanket and some water,” she murmured as she moved quickly from the room and closed the door.

I allowed a few minutes to pass as I quietly watched Anders from my place in the shadows. He adjusted the pillow beneath his head with a few pushes of his hands, sighed, and settled in. His teeth continued to chatter for a few moments afterward. Then, he opened his eyes, but lay still, hardly moving, only blinking as he stared at the ceiling.

As quietly as I could, I crept over to the door and opened it. “Sorry,” I said, clearing my throat. “I wanted a snack.” Crossing the room, I set the bowl next to the mattress, and then lay down next to Anders. “Oh, I’m a clod. I didn’t ask you if you wanted anything.”

“I’m alright. To be honest, food is the furthest thing from my mind.” He turned his head to look at me. I saw fear in his eyes, and I knew immediately why. Wynne had asked him about his childhood; perhaps he worried that I would do the same thing.

I decided, at once, that I would not. He would discuss it when he was ready.

“Do you want me to find a wet cloth for your head?” I brushed his damp hair from his eyes and face, tucking locks of blond hair behind his ear. I noticed, as I did so, that some of the strands contained white hair, especially at his temples. The thought of Anders with white hair made me smile.

“No, I want you to rest.” He smiled weakly at me. “Go back to our suite and sleep. Wynne and the rest can look after me.”

I moved my head to his chest. “I’m staying here. Just don’t be sick on me.”

“I think I’m moving onto the next phase of my recovery – horrid vertigo.” I could tell by the sound of his voice that he was still smiling. “But if you insist on staying, then I won’t force you out.”

I closed my eyes, aware of how truly tired I was. My body seemed to know the hour of night, even if I did not. I allowed the soft thudding of his heartbeat to lull me into sleep, which itself led into a strange dream.

I had never been to the Tevinter Imperium before, but I had seen paintings and drawings of the wide city streets of Minrathous, the once mighty avenues wider than the royal palace in Denerim now filled with crumbling blocks of granite, the limbs of magnificent marble statues, and, here and there, indications of wealth above poverty – homes behind great gates and guarded with their own private armies.

I stood in a square that I had seen in a drawing in a book that I once owned. I could not remember the name of the square, but I could see it as clearly as if I stood there – the silent fountain covered with the stone likenesses of demons, each one attempting to ascend to the final, circular tier, on which stood a bronze figurine of Andraste. I had read that the fountain was considered the city’s geographic center, and had not emitted a drop of water in nearly two hundred years.

In my dream, however, water spilled forth from Andraste’s feet, falling down the tier on which she stood, past the climbing Rage, Desire, and Chaos demons, and into the great, tiled pool on the lowest level.

Not a single soul stood in the square – not an animal, person, horse, or even a rat or mouse. In the distance, standing in the northeastern corner of the city, I could see the Great Forum, the building that housed both the Senate and the Archon. Like four ebony obelisks, each covered with countless blue runes, every single letter taller than I stood, the four Circles of the Imperium stood at each cardinal direction point.

“You are the foil to this plan,” a voice said behind me.

I turned around, but could not fine the speaker, not until I looked down. A boy stood there, his hands clasped behind his back, as if he was reciting a lesson. He was clean and dressed in a wide, long cloak with a substantial hood. However, his eyes glowed brightly with a warm, gold light.

The boy looked up at me, both his face and his voice earnest. “Don’t let them send you away. Many more people are going to die.”

“How?” I asked the boy. “Who’s going to die?”

The boy closed the distance between us and took both of my hands. I watched as he carefully turned my hands over, palms up, studying them with a great deal of scrutiny. He reminded me of a wandering fortune teller in the way that he wrinkled his brow, his eyes moving up and down the tiny lines in my hands.

“Anders used you before. He is using you again,” the boy said, his brow furrowing. His brown eyes moved from my hands to my face. “He doesn’t know how to stop. He won’t stop.”

I withdrew my hands sharply, and the boy jumped back and away from me. “How do you know this?” I demanded. “Who are you?”

“You need to be certain that you are on the right side.” Though the boy had a voice of a child that had not yet reached his teenage years, he spoke as if he was many years older. “Your alliance with the Grey Wardens is critical.”

“Even I knew that,” I said, knowing that my suspicion was obvious. “They are in political control of the Anderfels. Without them, we have no chance of successful rule. Now, who are you? Why do you care?”

“I am someone that has watched Thedas be shaped by the Grey Wardens.” I was surprised to see a smile touch the boy’s lips, a grin that suggested that, unlike me, he knew everything that was going on. “Their fates are intertwined. Do as Senator Quintus commands, but only for now. The moment will arrive, in the years ahead, when he will outlive his usefulness. It is then than you should change sides, and you will do it without Anders.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Who sent you?” I said, knowing that I was growing both hostile and impatient.

The boy turned away from me, started toward the fountain, then paused, turning only his head to look over his shoulder. “My mother sent me,” he said, the smile remaining on his lips.

*****

I awoke already sitting up, covered in sweat and breathing hard. A quick glance beside me told me that Anders was fast asleep, thankfully, and one up and across the room showed me that Lucius was seated at his writing desk, staring at me.

“Is the Fade being unkind with dreams?” He held his pipe in one hand, the smoke curling upward in small, uneven spirals.

“Somewhat.” I stood up from the mattress, smoothing down my rumpled, overly large robes.

“Would you come here for a moment, Hawke? We have much to discuss,” Lucius said, taking a small nip of his pipe. “I don’t wish to disturb Anders. He needs as much rest as possible.”

I crossed the room, picking up a footstool to sit upon as I did so. “I take it that more of your mysterious plans have come together,” I said.

He chuckled. “So they have.” Pushing back his chair slightly from the writing desk, he turned to watch me as I set the footstool down before him, then sat on it. “I’ve been thinking about something you said. Met King Alistair, did you?”

“Yes, I did.” I said, then proceeded to tell Lucius about our meeting, which had taken place a few months beforehand. It seemed as though it had happened in another lifetime.

Lucius nodded his head, then tipped it back, staring somewhere above my head as he smoked in silence for a long moment. When he spoke again, he did so in almost a dreamlike way. “I have written a letter to Lydius and Saul, both of which have been in my employ in the past. They are just a day’s ride away – what they are doing there is their own affair. These two men are brothers, both the bastard sons of one of my fellow Senators with which I have a rather long term alliance.” He looked down at me, his face still looking somewhat distant. “They are not mages, but they are very dedicated to our cause, and will do exactly what I pay them to do.”

“And what exactly do you intend to pay them to do?” I raised my eyebrows as I rested my elbows on my knees.

“To protect you.” Lucius narrowed his eyes. “You are going to deliver a letter that Anders will write, and you will deliver it to King Alistair. Then, you will begin formal negotiations with him. We must make sure that Ferelden will support Anders as king, whether explicitly or implicitly.”

“Wait…” I held up a hand in a gesture that, hopefully, might halt Lucius. “I see a lot of things that aren’t just risky in this – they’re near suicidal.”

“I am asking you to walk into the lion’s den,” Lucius said, tilting his head as he spoke. “Fortunately, the den isn’t far away. I wouldn’t be so foolish as to send you into Ferelden itself. Alistair isn’t there, at any rate. He is three day’s ride away, camped at the Cumberland border, making threats in the direction of Orlais.”

“So you’re going to send me into a massive Ferelden army stronghold,” I said as cheerfully as I could muster. “I can’t see anything wrong with that.”

“On the contrary, you walking directly into his tent will present King Alistair with more than a few problems.” Lucius tapped the side of his head with a pointed finger. “He knows that Orlais will want your head on a pike – granted, you are wrongly accused, a fact which you will have to convince Alistair of. As you already have a relationship with him, that should be your most simple task. He might consider delivering you to his wife with hopes of drawing Anders out, but that would cause more problems than it would solve, and Alistair would realize that.” He placed his spent pipe on a small cloth that sat, unfolded, on his writing table, and took up a small piece of metal with which he began to clean the refuse from the pipe. “If Alistair tries to use you against the Orlesians and their Chantry as a bargaining chip, he leaves himself open to many, many political issues. His own people would see him as easily swayed toward peace when the Orlesians have shown themselves to be unworthy allies. Some others may wonder if the Grey Wardens are so impartial at all. Not to mention the fact that, if you are executed, you stand the danger of being turned into a martyr by the revolution. He can’t afford to have the Ferelden Circle revolt when they’ve proven loyal to a crown that clearly works in their interests.” Lucius smiled as he finished speaking.

I tilted my head, staring at Lucius with a critical gaze. “What if you’re giving Alistair too much credit?”

“Hawke, I am the son of a common runesmith. I made my first ten thousand solidi on a worthless patch of bog that stood just above a lyrium mine when I was too young to be admitted into a brothel,” replied Lucius smoothly, his blue eyes resting calmly on my face. “I am a man that has built his entire life and fortune on risk, and it has made me one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the Imperium. Chance does not frighten me. It should not do the same to you.”

I hesitated, considering his words as I shifted my gaze to the moonlit window behind us. Lucius did have a point in all of this.

Lucius leaned toward me, leaving his pipe alone for the moment, the ashes scattered across the soft face of the textured cloth. “You will need allies in order for Anders to build the mage nation that he so desires. More allies than the Imperium alone. Anders is hated for what he has done. He must cross the bridge to legitimacy, from common terrorist to royalty. You alone can build this bridge.”

I did not flinch. I leaned closer to him, not breaking eye contact as I did so, and lowered my voice. “What’s in this for you?”

There. It was on the table. Explicitly. And I dared to say it because I was the Champion of Kirkwall, after all.

I was surprised that Lucius did not hesitate to answer. It was as if he had been expecting the question. “As I said to Anders, he is not the first to think of freedom from the Chantry. The Chantry is more a thorn in the side of Tevinter mages than it is elsewhere, yet a thorn does cause a wound, and the wound does bleed. No one likes to be injured, myself included. Some of us just happen to be better revolutionary symbols than others, while there are those that play the game from within, slowly pitting man against man and brother against brother.” Resting against the back of his chair, Lucius steepled his fingers, staring over them as he did so.

It was then that it was Lucius Quintus’s turn to shock me, as Anders had surprised him a few hours before with the news of his true identity.

“I have been waiting for someone like Anders for over thirty years.”

I sat up, as well, and studied Lucius. For all the rich fabric that he wore on his body, including the fine silk house shoes, not to mention the tobacco when such a luxury rarely left the borders of Rivain, he looked like another man. A Tevinter, perhaps – and since birth, I had been cautioned to never, ever trust Tevinter mages – but a mage. A powerful one, at that – perhaps not in terms of his magic, but in politics, which, I had to admit, both Anders and I could count among our weaknesses.

In truth, as little as I knew about Lucius, I could see the risk in this for him. We didn’t know how the Senate was reacting to Markus’s rebellion, though I could safely assume that they were worried. I knew that the Imperium had poor relations with every one of the nations in Thedas, and the Anderfels was no exception to this rule. Lucius had a family, though I hadn’t learned any more about his daughters other than that they were all my age and younger, and that they had married very well.

If we failed, and we were connected to Lucius, even a government filled with corruption such as the Imperium would call into question his ability to rule. Lucius would have to answer for his reasons for supporting us.

This entire plan stood on a house of cards, and I wasn’t even sure when the foundation on which it stood might begin to shake.

“I admit that his condition is a great inconvenience, but someone such as Anders may never walk, literally, into my home ever again,” Lucius continued in the same patient, honest voice. “I believe that I can cure him without killing him or causing Tranquility, but it will take time and resources that I do not have here at my disposal. When the harvest season comes, I will be returning to the Imperium with Wynne and Dagna. I intend to take Anders with me. I assume that you will come, as well.”

I nodded my head, though cautiously. “I do not want to be parted from him. You understand.”

“I do. There is plenty of room at my estate. Also, it is almost a tradition in the Imperium to harbor apostates from other lands; every one of the ruling families has at least one or two living on one of their properties. It’s become a joke at some of the most elite banquets.” Lucius, however, did not smile. “We will continue to live in a reciprocal relationship. I will provide for your needs, and you will do as I ask. You can leave at any time, but I do not believe that you will. I am the only one that can save your beloved. I am the only one that can install him on the throne.” Shaking his head, he raised his eyebrows, offering me a small smile. “Hawke, I do not mean to sound as if I am threatening you. I’m not. Now, before we get ahead of ourselves, baby steps first. King Alistair. Are you prepared to face him?”

I sat up straighter, the sleeves of my robes falling well over my hands, and held them up as evidence. “Certainly I might have something more suitable to wear than this?” As long as I was placing myself in danger, I decided that I should take advantage of Lucius’s open bank vault.

“Ah. Of course.” Lucius’s smile grew wider. “I know an excellent tailor in the city, and a barmaid at the Clever Hound Inn that is about your size. You won’t even need to reveal your location in order to attend a fitting.” He gestured almost effortlessly toward the window. “I’ll see that you have travelling clothes fit for a future queen.”


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Alistair agrees to aid Anders...with a few strings attached.

Lydius and Saul were both assassins by trade. They never said as such, but I could tell it in pretty much everything that they did. They greeted me politely when we met in Lucius’s library a few days later, but as we travelled, they did not offer much small talk. They brought with them a horse not unlike their own, a brown mare with markings similar to thousands of horses all over Thedas. On this horse I followed them through small trails in the forest rather than the main roads. We camped in thicker portions of the forests rather than in clearings, and Saul insisted that we keep our fire small and our meals simple.

Lydius and Saul preferred simple, lightweight leather armor, but Lucius had clearly demanded that I travel in style. I wore a summer-weight coat in blue brocade with closely-tailored sleeves and wide cuffs, the length of the hem falling well to my ankles, and trimmed in blue braid and carved wooden buttons. Under that, I also wore a tan waistcoat, a ruffled white shirt with a high neck, trousers, and riding boots.

I wasn’t sure if I felt like a queen. I felt like something, though. I worried for the first few hours that we would be attacked by highwaymen looking for easy prey, but I suppose the fact that I looked like a highwayman myself perhaps scared them off.

Or perhaps it was the menacing look to Lydius and Saul.

Or maybe we were just lucky.

I hadn’t ridden a horse in years, not since Jessica, our old mare, died while we fled Lothering. I knew that I would be in a great deal of pain from a hard ride, many hours a day, six days in a row. Fortunately, Anders had given me a pouch filled with vials of a mild painkiller.

I was glad to have the pouch. The soreness and stiffness was far worse than I had anticipated, but at least I had expected that the discomfort would be there.

We arrived at the gates to the Ferelden war camp at noon on the third day. Countless logs had been lashed together, the tops sharpened to a menacing-looking point, to form the fence that surrounded the perimeter. Inside the guarded gate, I could hear the sounds of the activities of war – an officer shouting commands, booted feet stomping in time with one another, the clang-clang-clang of a blacksmith’s hammer, and the excited barks of mabari warhounds.

I dismounted as we approached the two guards at the gate. Lydius and Saul followed my lead, Saul taking the reins of my horse as I stepped toward the guards, drawing the first of two letters from the pouch at my waist.

I had rehearsed this moment in my mind so many times over the past three days. Now that the moment arrived, I felt eerily calm.

“I have a message for King Alistair.” I extended the letter toward the nearest guard, who accepted it from me. “I will wait for a reply.”

The guards exchanged glances, and the one with the letter turned and headed into the camp.

The remaining guard, an elf, stared at me with a critical gaze. I pretended not to notice. No doubt that he was staring at my staff, which clearly marked me as a mage. Or perhaps it was the fact that, considering the way that I was dressed, I had more in common with a pirate from a child’s storybook than any mage he had ever met.

Or maybe it was my imagination playing tricks on me.

I glanced down at the coat, running my gloved hands over its surface. I did like the way that the lace from my shirt’s sleeves peeked over the cuffs of the coat, but damn it all, if it made me stand out like a sore thumb.

Lucius claimed that he had demanded that the tailor make Anders and I each an entire wardrobe of the most fashionable clothes from Minrathous and Hossberg. Apparently, coats such as mine were all the rage among women and men in Hossberg, though they tended to wear skirts with them, or something to that effect. I wasn’t sure.

Saul began to hum quietly to himself, ever-so-slightly rocking back and forth to his own music. In stark contrast, his older brother stood as still as a statue, arms at his sides, his eyes trained on the activity taking place just behind the guard’s position.

After what seemed like an eternity, the other guard returned, a look of surprise on his face. When he addressed me, it was as though he deliberately schooled his voice and face to appear more formal. “King Alistair will see you now. He asked that your companions wait outside.”

I had expected this, and the reaction of the guard proved my suspicions. I had no doubt that Alistair had guards waiting in his tent to apprehend me, and he simply wanted to make sure that he’d have as little resistance as possible.

Fortunately for me, I wasn’t guilty.

“Of course,” I said, trying to be friendly to the point of cheerfulness. Nodding at Saul and Lydius, I followed the guard that had delivered the letter past the elf and into the camp.

It wasn’t far to the largest and most well-guarded tent in the entire camp. We passed the pen that held the mabari, each of which seemed to be enjoying a rather large, rare slice of meat as their keepers filled several large bowls with clean water. In a clearing nearby, a blonde female dwarf stood on a platform, shouting orders at the company of soldiers that marched back and forth before her.

“This way, if you please.” The guard opened the flap in the large tent.

I followed, forcing a small smile on my face. Sure enough, I was not disappointed. Four armed soldiers stood in the tent, two apiece on either side of Alistair.

Alistair himself sat at a large writing desk, my letter in one hand. He had removed his gauntlets and helmet, which now rested on the edge of the desk; he was otherwise clad in a suit of bright armor. His face bore a nasty expression that suggested that he was holding back anger, which was the only thing that surprised me. Alistair wasn’t exactly known for being quick to anger; that aspect was usually reserved for his wife.

“Hawke.” He greeted me with a rather unfriendly tone of voice, a stark contrast to his behavior at my last visit. “I’ve heard that you’ve been naughty.”

“I know that you have, Majesty.” I gave him a bow as I spoke. “I have, however, been accused of a crime that I did not commit.” I did not look at his face, but deliberately trained my eyes on the ground. “Perhaps I might be responsible for being an accessory, but even then, I was an unknowing accomplice.” My heart hammered in my chest, and I fought to keep my voice calm.

“You have about, oh, one minute to explain yourself before these soldiers here become impatient.” I heard Alistair stand up, but I did not dare look up at him, not yet. “Nice bounty that the White Divine is offering for you. I wonder how far five hundred sovereigns goes nowadays.”

“It was Anders that destroyed the Chantry and killed the Grand Cleric, not I,” I said. Was my voice shaking? I hoped that it wasn’t. “Anders used a Tevinter recipe to create the weapon that destroyed the Chantry. He himself has confessed it to me, in front of several other witnesses, including Prince Sebastian of Starkhaven.”

Silence filled the tent, even though the world outside remained full of the cacophony of war. Hesitating, I raised my head to look at Alistair. Relief washed over me like a cool rain as I saw his face, with an expression that showed that he at least was considering what I had said.

Then, he stepped before the desk, crossing his arms. “Gentlemen, could you excuse us for a moment?” In a confident voice, he continued, “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. If she gets nasty, I have a bit of templar training that I could use to keep her under control until you arrive.”

I waited until the soldiers filed past me, closing the tent behind me, before I stood up straighter. “Thank you, Your Majesty,” I murmured. “I assure you that you that there will be no violence here, not from me.”

Alistair didn’t respond immediately. Instead, he tapped his bare fingers against his armored arms, making a quiet, rhythmic drumming noise. Then, after several stanzas of the drumming, he spoke: “I’m not sure what you’re doing here, if you didn’t want to turn yourself in to me. This is weird, and not in a good way. Your letter was weird, too. You know that all of that ‘I enjoyed our talk’ stuff doesn’t work on me, right? You’re up to something, Hawke.”

“You’re right.” So much for formality. It clearly was getting me nowhere with King Alistair. “Can you remove that bounty from my head?”

“You came all this way to ask me that?” Alistair raised his eyebrows. “It’s not my bounty, and this isn’t Ferelden. You’re not even one of my subjects…well, not really, unless you wanted to come home, and then we could probably find something for you to do.”

“No, that’s not really the reason I came to speak with you.” I sighed heavily, uncomfortable from the stiffness in my legs. The elixirs that Anders had brewed took away the soreness, but did nothing for the stiffness at all. “Oddly enough, I came to talk about Anders.”

“Do you know where he is?” Alistair asked, brightening somewhat. “Alem…er, my wife, the Queen, the, er, Warden-Commander is looking for him. She, ah, isn’t very happy with him.”

“So I’ve heard,” I said in a voice more deadpan than I intended. “As is the Ferelden Circle, the Templars, and probably a half-dozen other organizations.”

“If he was standing right in front of me, I wouldn’t be sure who to hand him over to first.” Alistair stroked his chin, apparently occupied by the thought for the moment. “On one hand, giving him to the Circle would be like helping an old friend. I try to keep the mages happy, you see. On the other hand, the Queen would have me sleeping on the floor for a year if I didn’t deliver Anders to her.”

“They’re not really happy, you know,” I said in a soft voice, willing to take any road where one presented itself. “The mages, I mean.”

“I know.” Alistair returned his gaze to me, his voice growing serious again. “I’m at a loss what to do about it, really. They want their freedom, and I would be more than happy to give it to them. The problem is, it’s not my freedom to grant.” He winced. “The Chantry starts making threats, I start hearing words like ‘Exalted March on Ferelden’ and it makes me want to hide under my bed.”

“It sounds like that Orlais is just looking for an excuse to attack Ferelden again,” I remarked.

“Mm, they have another thing coming if they think that they are in for an easy fight,” Alistair murmured. “Our numbers might not be as high as I would want, but what we lack in soldiers, we have in spirit.” He gestured at one of the walls of the tent, in the direction of the marching men and women. “Twelve years ago, most of them were too young to fight at Ostagar. Now, they have been trained to defend their homes.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Look, if I came at it asking them to serve me…that’s not the way I do things. This generation distrusts their leaders, and I have Loghain to thank for that. After all, their older brothers and sisters, their fathers and mothers – they died at Ostagar. So I ask them to fight this war to protect themselves and everyone that’s left. It makes them mad enough to pick up a sword and start swinging.”

“A good strategy,” I said with a nod. “But let me ask you this: if Orlais is looking to attack Ferelden anyway, what do you have to lose, exactly? If the hornet’s nest is already stirred up, they’re already going to sting whether or not you swat at them.”

Alistair narrowed his eyes and let his arms drop to his sides. “I’m not sure I follow you.”

I took a confident step toward him, lowering my voice. “What’s stopping you from helping the mages if Orlais is going to attack Ferelden whether you do anything or not?”

“Hmm.” Alistair looked up at the ceiling. “You have a point there.” His gaze, however, quickly returned to me. “You know, you might take this the wrong way, but what’s in it for you? You’re on the run. You don’t have time to go on mercy missions.”

It was then that I drew Anders’ letter out of one of the many pockets in my coat. “What would you say to a proposal so mad that it might actually work?”

“I helped my wife end a Blight almost single-handedly,” Alistair replied. “I’m used to mad, impossible plans. Go on. Let’s hear it.”

“The best part about this plan,” I said as I extended the letter toward him, “is that you only need give your support. It’s up to you to decide what form that support takes.”

“You and your letters.” Alistair took it from me with a heavy sigh, unfolded it, and was silent as he read it.

I waited, trying to keep my body very still, though I allowed a small smile to rise to the corners of my lips.

“Prince Frederick von Reiniger. Wait, I think I recall Bann Teagan and Arl Eamon discussing him years ago at some party and it caused a huge argument among the nobles there.” Alistair, again, looked up at the ceiling. “There was something about him, about the Crown Prince of the Anderfels suddenly disappearing and disinherited when he was too young to do anything wrong, really. There were rumors that King Gottfried found out that the Queen had been dallying behind his back, and Frederick’s bloodlines were called into question – or something like that. But it was just weird that Frederick just vanished completely. The Ander nobles wouldn’t even discuss him. We’re talking about a boy here, not a criminal. How much could a kid possibly do?”

“He’s a mage,” I said. Feeling that the smile was inappropriate, I allowed it to fade away.

“Of course!” Alistair looked back to me. “That makes sense. So, you ran into him while on the run? What was your opinion of him?”

“Probably slightly better than the Queen’s,” I said, trying to keep my voice neutral.

“What, Alemia knows him?” Alistair sat on the edge of his writing desk again. “I’ll have to write to her about him. She didn’t like him, did she?” He gave a shake of his head. “She can have an abrasive personality sometimes – believe me, I know.”

While this was an interesting sort of guessing game, I was starting to tire of it. “He’s a Grey Warden. You’ve met him,” I said.

“Prince Frederick, a Grey Warden?” Alistair’s eyebrows shot up. “Why didn’t I know about this before? It’s perfect! The Anderfels is ruled mostly by Lords and Ladies who also happen to be…” Suddenly, realization shifted into his gaze, and I watched his expression crumble. “Oh, Maker, no. You’re not talking about Anders, are you?”

I licked my lips nervously. “Yes.”

“No, no, no.” Alistair folded up the letter. “Not for you, not for the mages, not for anyone.” He shook his head furiously, as if to illustrate the point. “You were talking about impossible plans. Ending a Blight in a year is impossible. This is just plain stupid.”

“King Alistair,” I said in a soft voice, raising a hand to stop him. “Allow me to explain.”

“No, there’s nothing to explain, Hawke,” Alistair continued. “Look, I like you. I feel bad about you being on the run and such. I’d help you if I could. This, though?” He held up the letter. “You’d have to overthrow the Chantry, the Wardens, and the established government to put him on the throne. You can’t do that hiding in the forest and throwing a few fireballs. If he hadn’t gone and blown up the Chantry in Kirkwall, you might have had a chance. Now, you’re facing unpopular opinion, and I of all people know what a destructive force that can be.”

“Let’s go point by point.” I fought to keep my voice calm. “The established government isn’t established at all. Prince Markus killed his parents and caused the Templars to leave the Chantry. The Templars are now hunting and killing every mage in the Anderfels. Do you think that worries the Ferelden Circle the slightest bit? Don’t you think that Prince Markus himself might be a problem for Ferelden no matter what you do? You’re a known mage sympathizer, you know. As is the Queen. Won’t that cause an issue within the Wardens themselves?”

Alistair’s expression turned suspicious. “You have a point. Several…points, in fact. I didn’t think about it until just now, but I’d hate for Prince Markus to get the idea that he needs to join up with Orlais in a war against Ferelden. And I never like to see any problems concerning the Wardens happen at all. You’re right, though. The whole thing is a big, nasty mess that might catch fire at any moment.” He gave a light shake of his head. “And again, I don’t want to turn my friends against me. I can’t have the Ferelden Circle ask me to do something about the deaths of their fellow mages, then get mad when I say that my hands are tied.”

It was then that something Anders had recently said echoed in my mind. “There can be no neutral parties here,” I said softly. “No matter what is easier or more appropriate.”

Crossing behind the writing table, Alistair sat in the chair, and put his head in his hands. “Look – Anders…I don’t know about this, Hawke. The Chantry…I mean, they’re not kind to the mages at all. I trained to be a Templar; I of all people should know. And there’s a lot of corruption and hypocrisy, but even the better kingdoms have all of that, mine included. But to destroy a Chantry building, to kill a Grand Cleric…that’s spitting in the eye of the Maker. I don’t like that. Do you?” For a moment, he looked up at me.

“King Alistair, there is no excuse for murder or the destruction of sacred ground,” I said in a quiet voice. “But in the end, the Grand Cleric and her Chantry are symbols of the destruction of Andraste’s original intentions. She wouldn’t like the Maker’s words and creations to be used to destroy lives and to cause so much misery, don’t you think?”

“What you’re talking about is bigger than all of us.” I saw the uncertainty behind Alistair’s eyes.

I leaned forward, resting my hands on his writing table. “So was the Blight.”

I don’t know how I did it. Looking back, I can’t help but to look up to the sky on the whole matter, and wonder if, in fact, I was receiving sacred help to put the right words in my mouth.

Or maybe I was just lucky.

Alistair slowly nodded his head, then sat up straight, resuming a bearing of command, even if his voice did not follow suit. “I’m not going to say yes, Hawke. But I’m also not going to say no. I’ll need to do something first, and if you want to see this through, I’ll need your help.”

“I’m listening.” I did not dare move.

“I want you to tell me the truth. Am I the first ruler that you’ve spoken to concerning this whole thing?”

It was then that I stood up straight. “No,” I replied simply. “I’ve spoken to Senator Lucius Quintus of the Tevinter Imperium.”

Looking down for only a brief moment, Alistair silently mouthed a foul word. Then, he closed his eyes. “No, I see why you did that. As much as I hate getting into bed with the Imperium, it might have been the smartest thing that you’ve done. Promise me – a personal promise to me as a person, not a king – that you will not trust them. Promise me that you will watch every move that they make and make sure that any bit of help they give you is paid in full.”

“I have reason to believe that the Imperium’s intentions are true,” I said.

“They’ll have you believe that.” Alistair opened his eyes. “Especially Quintus. I’ve met him – before I was king, even. About fifteen years ago, he sought out Duncan – you never met Duncan, and neither did Anders, but Alemia could tell you about him. He was in Denerim, and invited Duncan to his house for dinner. Duncan was suspicious, so he brought me and another Warden along. It was just dinner and talk – nothing violent or unusual happened. I think Quintus only had his wife there, and she didn’t say much. But when we left, Duncan and I sat up by candlelight for hours picking apart what we had discussed.”

My gaze turned to a chair resting near one of the walls of the tent. I walked over to retrieve it. “What did you two discover?”

“Quintus was clearly looking for information about the Grey Wardens,” Alistair continued, his eyes bright with memory. “He said that he had just returned from a trip to Weisshaupt, but naturally, the Wardens there weren’t took keen about giving him the grand tour. After all, the Imperium isn’t exactly on the best terms with every other country, least of all the Anderfels and Orlais. I remember that he said something about wineing and dining the Wardens in the Imperium, but if I remember right, there aren’t that many there. Not as few as in Ferelden, though. He wanted to know if we felt as if we got enough support from King Cailan, finances and supplies and such, and other things I’m sure I don’t remember. I do remember that Duncan suspected that Quintus was going to try to get the Wardens’ support for a political action in the Imperium, but the fact that he was wineing and dining Wardens not even from the Imperium suggested something bigger.”

“Let me guess, he hasn’t contacted the Queen himself.” It sounded suspicious, but didn’t amount to much.

“She wasn’t even a Warden back then,” Alistair replied. “But since she’s been in charge of Ferelden, no. The only news she hears from the Grey Wardens in the Imperium comes from the Deep Roads. There are more entrances to the Deep Roads in the Anderfels and the Imperium combined than the rest of the Thedas, together, twice over. The Wardens in the Imperium usually handle their own problems. They’re mostly mages. Big surprise, there.” He tilted his head, “Since we’re talking about the Wardens and the Queen, that’s the next person you’ll need to talk to, you know. And no, I’m not going to appeal to her on your behalf.” He pointed at me. “I’m not being cruel, Hawke. I’m playing the small amount of politics that I know how to play, while trying to keep the peace in my own family.”

“Let’s get started, then.” I tried to put on an air of being as friendly and open to the idea as possible. “What do I do?”

“I’ll write you a letter of introduction, and on top of it, a letter of diplomatic immunity.” Alistair paused, then let out a heavy sigh. “Bloody letters. Anyway, the immunity will only help with any guards you run into. It may work with the Templars. It might not. Anyway, inside of Vigil’s Keep is a completely different situation. That’s Warden land. It’s their sovereignty.” He ran a hand through his hair. “You know, there’s a better way of doing this, and it might give you more credence. Do you think you can encourage Anders to turn himself in to the Wardens, then plead his case? Without him, you’re more likely to be wasting your time, and it will just anger the Queen. She’s not going to want to help you if you’re aiding someone that she’s looking to arrest.”

“Good point. I don’t know. I’ll have to talk to him.” I knew I would have to do some awfully fast talking, and I wouldn’t blame Anders for refusing. After all, this was placing him at risk.

I wondered what Lucius would think of all of this.

“Having the Warden-Commander of Ferelden on your side will be huge. You’ll have to face the First Warden, who is her superior, as you must know,” said Alistair. As he talked, he took a sheet of parchment, placed it in front of him, and reached for a pen. “You should know that before Markus’s rebellion, it was the First Warden that was really in charge of the Anderfels, not the crown.”

“I thought that the Grey Wardens were supposed to be neutral in all issues but the Blight,” I murmured, irony creeping into my voice.

Alistair let out a light snort. “You’re asking my wife to take sides, so you know that no one really follows that rule. Least of all in the Anderfels. If you get lucky, Markus will irritate Eisenberg a bit too much, and he might come to your side out of sheer principal. Interesting man, Eisenberg. The only half-dwarf I’ve ever met, or that was willing to admit it.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Half-dwarf. You’re right. I don’t think I’ve ever met one before.”

“At any rate, if the Queen agrees to speak to Eisenberg on your behalf, bring Anders to me. I’ll think of some way to meet with him that doesn’t cause too many problems for any of us.” Alistair began to play with his quill pen, twirling it between his fingers. I hoped for a moment that it was clean of ink, and had the mental image, for a moment, of splashes of black covering the king’s nose. “Oh, yeah. There’s someone we’ve both forgotten. If we don’t get his support…well, I don’t think we should leave him out. It would be wrong and rude.”

“Who?” I raised my eyebrows.

I could tell from the expression on his face that Alistair was about to say something that he knew that I wouldn’t like. “First Enchanter Irving.”


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Hawke returns to Cumberland, then she and Anders disembark to Amaranthine. Anders tells her a story about life in the Anderfels.

“You’re right.” I sat up very straight in my chair. “But…”

“…I’m asking an apostate to waltz right into the Ferelden Circle and not expect to be trapped there. Actually, I’d be asking two apostates to do that.” Alistair made a hissing noise through his teeth. “Anders needs to go with you. Why is he sending you around to do all of these negotiations?”

“Because he’s in hiding,” I replied.

“Oh, right. Blasphemy and terrorism and all.” Alistair stroked his beard. “Smart move on his part. Irving isn’t going to want to leave the tower to see Anders. He has his own position with the Templars to consider, and his own safety to guard.”

I couldn’t help but smirk. “You could have your queen conscript him into the Wardens.”

“Ha!” Alistair’s gaze went to me, and he gave a light shake of his head. “Not funny.”

“Sorry, Your Majesty,” I said quickly.

“Forget it.” Alistair tapped the feathered end of the quill against his chin. “I can’t really summon him, not all the way out here. He is quite elderly. That would be asking him to travel fairly far.”

Suddenly, an idea came to me as a flash, and I snapped my fingers. “Wynne.”

“Wynne!” Alistair grinned broadly for only a moment, before he appeared confused. “You know Wynne? How is she doing?”

“She’s working with Senator Quintus.” Now it was my turn to drum my fingers on the desk. “Are there any towns near the Ferelden Circle? Naturally, I’ve never been near it.”

“There’s an inn on the other side of the lake. I stayed there years ago for a night or two,” said Alistair, staring past me as he spoke. “If the inn is still in business, you could have Wynne encourage Irving to come out there, to a private room maybe, and…it’s risky. If nothing’s changed, I remember a few Templars keeping posts out there. Granted, the Templars at the Ferelden Circle are more sympathetic to the mages than anywhere else in Thedas, but I’ve heard reports of a few bad apples.”

“So have I,” I said darkly.

“There you are. There’s your plan. Get Irving and the Queen on board with you, and you’ll have Ferelden’s support.” Alistair offered me a smile. “Now, I’ve got a few letters to write for you. Have a walk around the camp, play with the mabari, and by the time you’re covered in drool, I should be ready.” The smile turned into an impish grin. “The mabari really like to play fetch. I think their trainers might have some leather balls that you can borrow.”

*****

“He’s crazy. I won’t do it.”

I hardly recognized Anders when I had returned to Lucius’s tower not even ten minutes before. No sooner had I returned my horse to Lydius and bid them both farewell than I saw three other figures, themselves on horseback, riding on the beach.

I easily recognized Dagna perched high in a saddle on a horse far too big for her; despite all of this, she had a wide grin on her face. Lucius rode his noble, bay gelding as if he had been born to it, with a straight back and a high-held head.

Riding between them was Anders, but at first glance, I saw only a nobleman in very foreign attire that looked as though he wanted to be anywhere but on horseback. He wore a red velvet coat with fitted sleeves and wide cuffs not unlike the blue one that Lucius had made for me. Like mine, the coat was very long, the hem falling to his ankles, with the bright gold buttons stopping somewhere around his waistline. His waistcoat and breeches were fitted tightly to his slim frame, and he wore shoes with gold buckles instead of boots.

I had just finished telling the three of them about the meeting between King Alistair and me, and watched as Anders continued to shake his head. “No. Just no. Hawke did very well on her own. I’m not going to go with her.”

“King Alistair might have a point.” Lucius held up a hand for silence. “Particularly regarding the Warden-Commander. King Alistair is playing his hand very carefully in this, and we might be wise to follow his recommendations. After all, he of all people knows his wife best.”

“I know his wife too,” Anders pointed out. “I’m pretty sure that she’ll tear off my head and spit down my neck.”

“Hold your peace, Anders,” murmured Lucius, casting a glance in his direction. “Perhaps this might be a true test of Hawke’s diplomatic abilities. As for you, Prince Frederick, you will have no greater test of your own in such a situation. Among the Wardens, at least, your worst fear will be incarceration. In the scenario with the First Enchanter, your life may be at stake.” The fingers of one of his free hands began to stroke his mount’s mane. “King Alistair’s advice is true on many accounts. You will need the backing of the Ferelden Grey Wardens. Hawke is not a Grey Warden. She can plead on your account, but in the end, it will be a fruitless gesture. You will both go to Amaranthine.”

“If you’ll allow me, Master, I would like to go with them,” Dagna said, looking between the two of us. “If it wasn’t for the Queen, I’d be hammering out shields in Orzammar. It would be great to tell her how grateful I am for her help.”

“I’m afraid I can’t spare you, Dagna.” Lucius looked toward Dagna. “You know how critical your work is to mine. Perhaps you can write a letter and Hawke can deliver for you.”

Dagna did not say anything else, but she also was unable to hide her disappointment.

“As for Wynne, I will discuss the matter with her as soon as we return our horses,” Lucius continued as he turned his attention to his own tower. “If all falls into place, she can travel to the Circle Tower while you two are en route to Amaranthine.” He pointed a finger at Anders and I. “No long holidays. Have your meeting with the Warden-Commander and move on toward the tower immediately. Travel light and as inconspicuously as possible. I do intend to return to Minrathous before the snow starts to fall.”

*****

“This is much better than our last time on a boat together,” Anders murmured, his lips resting against one of my bare shoulders.

I chuckled. Sweat beaded on my forehead and caused Anders’ chest to glisten. I sat astride his lap, reveling in our closeness, in the waning moments of pleasure that had just taken place.

“Are you hungry?” Raising my head, I kissed his heated, damp forehead before sliding off of his lap and sliding him out of me.

“Maker, you always have this overwhelming urge to feed me after we’re together. Why is that?” Anders did not bother to hide his nakedness, and neither did I.

We were in our private cabin on the HMS Grandeur, which, we both remarked, was an exceedingly stupid name for a ship, especially a Fereldan one. Granted, it far from the largest cabin on the ship – in fact, when I climbed off the bed, I immediately found myself with my back to the door to the room. But it wasn’t the hold, it was clean and kept clean by a servant, and it had its own window.

“Something about sating our desires makes my belly feel un-sated. Is that a word?” The servant had left a bowl of fruit on a table that functioned as both a writing and a dressing table. It felt strangely unhygienic to have a bowl of bananas next to a washing bowl, but it did not stop me from taking two bananas and tossing one to Anders.

“No,” he said as he peeled his banana and took a large bite. “We might as well enjoy it while we can. That reminds me for some reason of something I meant to tell you. Lucius heard some interesting news about the Warden-Commander and King Alistair.”

“She’s pregnant?” Considering the small legend that had been built around the woman, it would not have surprised me to have such an improbable thing happen.

“No, quite the contrary.” Anders continued to wolf down his banana, not bothering to stop speaking while chewing. “The two of them have given up, and by the end of the year, King Alistair will announce his successor and submit his choice to the Landsmeet. There’s a lot of speculation about who it might be, and nothing is solid. Some say that King Cailan might have had a bastard of his own. Others say it’s this noble or the other. Lucius, however, has other ideas.”

“Funny, court gossip doesn’t seem to be his thing.” I took a bite of my own banana and chewed.

“He gets mail pretty much daily from the Imperium – letters, public notices, things of that sort,” Anders continued. “Anyway, word got back to the North Circle in Minrathous that the Warden-Commander had called in a favor of First Enchanter Irving for a mage to be transferred to Vigil’s Keep and put under her watch. Irving took some heat from the Templars for it, too, since it was made to look like that the Warden-Commander was conscripting the mage. She didn’t.”

“Some noble’s kid, I bet,” I remarked.

“Not just ‘some noble’s kid’.” Anders tossed the peel into the rubbish bin, then stood up, reaching for his clothes. “Connor Guerrin, Alistair’s cousin. That would be ‘Arl Connor Guerrin’ if he wasn’t a mage.” I caught the darkness flickering in his eyes as he said this.

“You know, the more and more that the Warden-Commander tries to make the Ferelden Grey Wardens a neutral organization, the less and less that they look like one.” I, too, dressed, though I wasn’t sure what we would do next, except take a long walk around the deck before dinner. “A mage as King of Ferelden. I can hear Loghain Mac Tir rolling over in his grave now. I wonder why Alistair didn’t mention this to me.”

“Because he doesn’t need to – yet.” Anders seemed to be struggling with his trousers as he talked. “If Orlais attacks Ferelden, though, all cards go on the table. I loathe buttons, by the way. No wonder they’re all the rage in Minrathous. Only Tevinters would come up with something to trap you in your own clothes.”

*****

After dinner, we took another walk on the deck, moving away from the small groups of passengers that gathered here and there. A few tables and chairs had been dragged onto the aft deck, and a mixture of humans and dwarves seemed to be enjoying multiple games of cards and dice. The forward deck, however, was strangely and eerily deserted, allowing us complete privacy as we strolled slowly toward the front of the ship.

“You know, I have to admit it – I don’t know very much about the Anderfels,” I said quietly, taking Anders’ hand as the other passengers, at last, were quite out of earshot.

I watched as Anders stared out at the darkening sky before us. Behind us was a fabulous sunset, filled with a spectacular show of purples, reds, blues, and even oranges – a painting that seeped, like a watercolor, toward the blackness before us, peppered with tiny stars. “When you inherited the manor, if you hated the way it looked, you could have hired a carpenter to add a room, or a painter to paint the walls. You could have bought new rugs, or had a mason build a new hearth. That’s how I’m thinking of the Anderfels now. I’m inheriting a dilapidated ruin of a home, and I intend to hire in every master craftsman that I can to see that my dream of a better house is fulfilled. Then, when I’m finished, I’m going to hold a great big party and invite tens of thousands of my closest friends.”

“That’s a good way of looking at it.” I smiled up at him. I wanted to tell him that no amount of changing any laws would change the geography, or would repair the damage that the darkspawn had done to the land over the centuries. But to disturb him, at that moment, seemed fruitless.

“There are places in the Anderfels that the Darkspawn have completely destroyed.” Anders stared out over the lake, his gaze distant and calm. He allowed my hand to drop. “You’ve spoken of Lothering – these places are nothing like Lothering. They were made barren hundreds of years ago, defiled by the darkspawn, and ruined so completely that nothing grows there now. In some of these places, there isn’t even dirt, just rocks and snow.” Taking a step forward, he rested his hands on the railing that surrounded the entire ship. “When you grow up in the Anderfels, you learn early that going exploring will mean the death of you. Parents don’t coat it in sugar. Little girls have nightmares of becoming broodmothers before they can become mothers themselves. As a boy, I used to wake up screaming after dreams of being eaten alive by darkspawn. The parents warn you, no matter if you are noble born or a sheep herder’s son, not to ever go off alone, especially to one of these blighted places.”

It was a rare moment. Anders spoke of his childhood without being prompted or prodded, and I found myself terrified that one word out of me would chase the moment away, like a dream or a specter.

“You would think that places so dangerous would be left alone.” Anders’ gaze seemed to focus on a distant star on the horizon. “No. The steppes are places for training. For our own Harrowing, if you want to call it that. Every few months or so, Father would send me out with his men and spend the night in the steppes. Sometimes, he’d tell them to pitch their tents away from mine, and forbade me to speak to them. Other times, he’d deprive me of food or weapons.” He crossed his arms over his chest, tucking his hands beneath his arms. “He said that he would make a warrior King out of me, as he was, and would do for me what my grandfather did for him. I…” Anders hesitated, shivered, and then let out a small, strange laugh. “I’m sorry.”

“What for?” I stepped up next to him, resting a hand on his arm.

“It’s been years since I thought about those things,” he said, turning his head slightly to look at me. “Sort of weird talking about them.”

“Take your time,” I murmured.

“I hated my father. I always have. I remember it being my first and only reaction to him.” Anders continued to look at me. “The Grey Warden lords always said that he was a man of action, always willing to do things right away. Now that I’m older and I look back at it, I know that they liked him because he knew his place. He was more warlord than a king. It was his job to punish, to execute, and to destroy anything that threatened the peace. The Wardens took care of everything else, and they didn’t meet in between.”

I didn’t say anything, but I was thinking of Justice, of Vengeance, of this Beast that lived inside of him now, no, always had been there. All of these spirits, these demons, whatever they were – they, in some way, signified a willingness to take action. Horrible, violent, extreme action.

It would have killed Anders to realize it, but he had become everything that he hated in his father.

Or perhaps he knew it already.

“When I was twelve, Father called me to court, in the middle of the biggest group of his supporters that he could gather in one place. He told me that I was going to start training to be a soldier, that either I’d become a man on my own or he’d make me one, by the Maker.” Anders drew one of his hands out from under his arm and clenched it into a fist. “He had me sent to the Blightlands, where there was an attachment of the army stationed alongside the Wardens. To the commander there, he sent a letter with very explicit instructions as to what was to be done to me. Do you know anything about the Blightlands, Hawke?”

“I heard that there are more darkspawn there than any other place in Thedas,” I replied.

“Outside of the keep there, there is a place where only one tree grows.” He looked out at the sea again. “There are stories that say that the darkspawn deliberately allow this tree to stand so that they can torture and murder soldiers upon its branches. If you get close enough, you can see two words carved into the trunk there: ‘I remember’. The stories claim that the words were put there by a former commander of the post, who, in full view of her men, was changed into a broodmother. My father wanted for me to spend the entire night under this tree.”

Anders hugged himself again, but it was as if I wasn’t even there, and that he was still that frightened twelve-year-old boy under the branches of a bloodstained tree. “I expected to hear the howls of the darkspawn all night long. I was close enough. It was the middle of the winter. There should have been wind. There should have been snow. But there was nothing.”

I heard a change in his voice. This was no longer the Anders that I knew, but young Prince Frederick von Reiniger, a boy, untrained in battle and frozen in his fear. I could almost see the branches of a pine tree shadowing his pale face, and those brown eyes wide, round, and unblinking.

“Never in my life had I seen such a thing. I haven’t seen it since,” he whispered, his voice no louder than the waves upon the hull of the boat. “The darkspawn don’t rest. They don’t ever sleep. Some of them are capable of stealth attacks, but that wasn’t what happened. There was no sound. Nothing but their fires, flickering nearby, never going out. That’s when I heard her.”

“Her?” I barely allowed the word to escape my lips.

“Someone was crying out to me. Someone knew that I was there. I knew even then that it wasn’t a good thing. I knew better than to look for the source of the voice.” Anders’ own tones began to tremble. “I didn’t care who was watching, or if my father’s men could see me. I hid in the shadows of the tree. I tried to make myself as small as possible. I braced myself for what I was sure was coming – the screams of the darkspawn, running across the plain to me, their teeth on me, tearing me apart even while I lived. But there, on the rocks, I saw something moving. Something crawling toward me across the dead plain. Something that could smell me when the darkspawn could not.”

I didn’t want to hear anymore. I fought the urge to beg Anders to stop talking, to change the subject to the dangerous task before us, or even to something as silly and as trivial as the fruit bowl in our cabin. Yet I found myself transfixed, almost as if Anders had placed me under some sort of mesmerizing enchantment.

Or, as if I was the young boy beneath the tree on a desolate, silent plain.

“She had no legs,” whispered Anders. “I could see that even before she could see me – but she could smell me. Oh, Maker. She knew that I was food to her, and she knew I was there, but she could not yet articulate it to the others. She couldn’t because she was not yet completely one of them.” His fingers clutched his own biceps, his fingers turning white from the force. “She was a girl, only slightly older than me. They had torn off her clothes when they violated her, and torn off her legs. A baby broodmother, not even old enough to be a mother herself. Already she was bald and swollen from the corruption, but as she came toward me, she looked up at me. She wanted to ask for help, but did not know how to speak anymore. She could only scream.”

Reaching out a hand toward the dark, foaming, churning waters beneath us, his pale fingers clawed the air, once. “I did the only thing I could do, and I did not know I could do it until the moment that it happened. I reached out a hand to her, and a bolt of lightning came out of my hand. It hit her between her eyes, and she died.” Drawing back the hand, Anders looked down at it. “It was my first spell, and I used it to help someone that was suffering. I knew that I had saved her from a worse fate, but then came the knowledge of a worse one for me. Maker, then and there, I wanted death to come upon me.” His brown eyes met mine. “No child should ever need to wish such a thing.”

I started to say something, but I did not have the chance. I was not aware that someone was sitting nearby – and, apparently, from the look on his face, neither was Anders – until I caught a shadow falling across both of our bodies.

“For two people who were instructed to keep a low profile,” murmured a voice in a heavy Antivan accent, “you were very easy to find.”


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Zevran delivers a warning to Hawke and Anders, and all three arrive in Amaranthine. Also, Anders confirms Hawke's worst fears about Lucius.

Anders and I turned to look at a pile of wooden crates that had been placed near one of the edges of the deck. Seated on the top of the pile as if he had been there the whole time – and I was fairly sure that he hadn’t – was Zevran. One of his legs dangled down the side of the crate, while the other was bent, pressed closed to his chest, and hugged by Zevran’s thin arms.

“You do get around, don’t you?” I frowned up at him.

“And he apparently doesn’t know what a private conversation is, either.” Anders did not look happy about seeing Zevran appear so suddenly, either. “What do you want?”

“Hm.” Zevran cast a glance around the deck before returning his gaze to us. “It is said that you should choose a dessert to compliment a fine meal. As I had the chicken and the beef, many options are open to me.” He opened his arms wide for a moment, as if to illustrate his point. “Perhaps a brunette, like a fruitcake, to be sweet yet likely to last a long time. Or a blond – both wholesome and lean together, filled with mysterious delights and finished with thick cream.” His gaze settled, pointedly, on us. “Or the both of them together.”

“No, and I speak for the both of us,” Anders said in a sour voice.

“I speak for myself.” I cast a sideways glance at Anders. “No.”

“Pity,” Zevran said in a mock-wistful voice. “Anything I could do to change your mind? Wear a costume? A wig? A beard?”

A few words rumbled out of Anders’s lips, and suddenly, a ball of lightning formed in the palm of his hand. “You have about five seconds –“

“Anders –“ I hissed, my eyes darting toward the back of the ship. I caught myself shivering, hoping that the card and dice players remained exactly where they were.

“Take it easy, my friend.” Zevran held up both of his hands. “We don’t want to turn this into a shocking situation.” He chuckled uneasily. “After all, I’m here for your benefit. I wouldn’t kill me until I knew what that benefit was. Then again, I wouldn’t kill me at all.”

Anders closed his hand, and the lightning ball vanished.

“What do you mean?” I looked up at Zevran again.

The assassin turned over onto his belly, slid off the crates, and landed on the deck lightly, not unlike a cat. “Starkhaven is lovely this time of year. Parties every day and every night. Plenty of food, song, gossip, and nobles looking to kill one another. A lucrative place for someone like me, don’t you think?”

“This is about Sebastian Vael.” Anders’ voice still sounded very sour.

“When I was younger and foolish, I believed that there was no such thing as coincidence,” said Zevran as he glanced, again, between us. This time, however, his look was less predatory. “Ever since I started to associate with the Grey Wardens, however, I have seen fate in the very flesh. Imagine my surprise when I went to meet a contact, and found a very familiar face.”

“Whatever he paid you,” I said in a quiet voice, “we can double.”

“He did not pay me at all, sadly.” Zevran shook his head. “Not yet. There were two others there, one being a member of the Antivan Crows. Fortunately, neither the Crow nor Prince Sebastian recognized me. Anders, you might be somewhat flattered to know that Sebastian made a contest of your assassination. One thousand crowns for the first able to provide proof of your demise, with a promised bonus if Hawke lost her life in the process.”

“A thousand crowns.” Anders’ eyes widened.

“At least the other shoe has dropped,” I said. “We expected this all along. The question is, are you going to claim yourself the winner of this contest, Zevran?”

“Fortunately for you, no,” the elf replied smoothly. “I decided that I had not sufficiently repaid you both for saving my life in Kirkwall and chose instead to warn you. You were easy to find, which is the part that you should first be concerned about.”

Anders tilted his head. “Go on.”

“Sebastian suspected that the two of you were still in the Free Marches, or in Nevarra,” Zevran continued. “We drew straws, I chose Cumberland, and we went on our way. You are fortunate that you did not go to Starkhaven. The city is in a state of marshal law. Sebastian himself is taking part in patrols and the questioning of anyone with a staff. Or anyone that looks like they might own one. At any rate, I ran into Dagna, literally, as I came into town. Parcels all over the ground and such. Nasty mess. She remembered me from Orzammar, and I offered to buy her a drink.”

“We have to teach her to keep her mouth shut,” I said with a heavy sigh.

“Don’t be hard on her.” Zevran clicked his tongue. “She didn’t give me your names, but she mentioned that her employer was treating an abomination, also that the case was unusual and severe. I drew my own conclusions from her silence on the details. Then, she mentioned that she was fucking Lucius Quintus.”

The silence that fell upon the deck was almost total, save for the splashes of the water upon the boat. I didn’t even know what to say to that. Neither, quite obviously, did Anders.

“I see that you didn’t know,” murmured Zevran, a grin rising to his face. “As much as I am always a fan of human-dwarf relations, especially when the bedroom Landsmeet takes a moment to listen to the plea of the elves, I was far more interested in seeing if my suspicions were true, if her lover-come-employer was indeed protecting the two of you. However, by the time that I walked Dagna home, we saw that a number of Templars had arrived first.”

“Templars?” Anders finally found his voice.

“Apparently you left just as they were arriving.” Zevran nodded his head. “It had been observed that Lucius was spending a great deal of money, and was making inquiries about some rather controversial topics. It caught the attention of the Chantry. Lucius tried to make a claim of diplomatic immunity, but the Templars were not impressed. They revoked his pass from the North Circle and ordered him to return to the Imperium.”

“So, we can’t go back to the tower.” I sighed heavily. “Great.”

“Wynne did some quick talking. The Templars ordered her to return to the Ferelden Circle,” Zevran continued. “She suggested that I escort her to a ship bound for Highever. As we left, she gave me a message to deliver to you both from Quintus. She told me what ship you two had just boarded, and gave me money for a ticket. She said that Lucius told you to continue with his instructions, and then meet him in Minrathous with Wynne.”

“Do you think that they knew that we were there?” asked Anders.

“That Lucius had guests? Yes. That much was obvious,” replied Zevran. “That his guests were you two? No.”

“Lucius needs to know what you’ve told us.” Anders looked at me as he spoke, though his words were obviously directed at Zevran. “He needs to be told that you were hired by Vael to kill the two of us.”

“Done and done.” Zevran smiled again. “That is to say, Wynne and Dagna both know. One of them will be sure to tell him. Dagna stayed behind to make arrangements for Lucius’s belongings to be sent to his home in Minrathous. Wynne is on her way to Highever. Lucius, unfortunately, is under Templar escort to the border.” He hissed through his teeth. “This is sure to cause an international incident, considering his position in the Senate.”

“And where does that leave you?” I asked.

“On holiday, it seems.” Zevran shrugged his shoulders. “The coin purse that Wynne gave to me was rather full. As it has been a long time since I’ve been to Ferelden, I might take the opportunity to enjoy it. Perhaps look up some old friends.”

“You don’t say?” Anders said in a dull voice. “We’re doing the same thing.”

“Hm.” Zevran ran a hand under his chin. “Judging by your disposition, I would guess the opposite. Perhaps I might be of some assistance?”

Anders and I quietly exchanged dubious glances. We were clearly thinking the same thing, or something close.

“I’ll tell you what - you two talk it over, and tell me if I might be of further service to you.” Zevran took a few steps back and away from us. “There is no rush. We’ve two weeks left of this journey, after all. In the meantime, I shall look for dessert elsewhere, and leave you two to your interlude.” He offered us a small bow. “Good night.”

We both did not speak until Zevran walked up the short flight of stairs to a smaller deck, opened a door, and descended another stairwell into the internal decks of the ship.

“I don’t like any of this.” I said, staring at the door as it closed behind Zevran. “There are too many unknowns. Why would the Chantry suddenly come after Lucius? He’s owned that tower for decades.”

“Perhaps the Chantry is growing nervous,” Anders said in a quiet voice. “They want all of the free travelling mages under their thumb, or at least under their surveillance.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me.” I rested a hand on one of Anders’ arms. “Should we bring Zevran along with us?”

“I don’t know.” Anders suddenly sounded very tired. “I’ll need to think it over.”

*****

“Has the Beast been quiet?”

It had been a little over a month since I had first heard of the Beast, and now, I found myself wondering why I hadn’t heard about him at all. Every night, before he fell asleep, Anders opened a small leather case, took out a vial of red liquid, drank it, and put the empty vial in a pouch. Everything without stopping, everything systematic and in order.

Every night, I waited for more insight into the progress of his condition. I wanted something. Anything. A joke would have sufficed. Yet Anders seemed to make every effort to avoid the discussion, even when it obviously weighed heavily on our minds.

Now, we were within hours of reaching our next destination. At the sight of the shore close to Amaranthine, Anders, Zevran, and I each returned to our rooms to gather our possessions.

Shouldering his pack, Anders raised his gaze and rested it on my face. “No. He’s never quiet. Not now. Not now that I know that he’s there. Everything I think about, every step of our plan, he has an alternative scenario. His ideas…” Trailing off, he turned his head, staring out the window. “He wants me to kill more people, but to do it in the most grandiose way he can possibly devise. In his opinion, the world has shown me such little regard, so I should show the same in kind.”

“And you’ve told him to sod off.” It was as if I was trying to convince myself of this more than trying to convince Anders not to do something so rash.

My stomach sank as my words elicited no reaction from Anders. Instead, he opened the door to our cabin and left the room.

I followed him in silence, up the stairs, up onto the deck, and out into the sunshine. Before us, I could see Ferelden’s shores spreading out, sandy and sparkling, lapped by the blue-green waves. Crowds of passengers had started to gather on the deck; fortunately, I did not see Zevran among them.

Anders found a portion of the railing at a part of the deck well out of earshot of the nearest passenger and leaned against it. I stood next to him, one of my shoulders pressed against one of his arms. I stood close, waiting for him to speak again, praying without words and hoping that Anders wasn’t planning on something that would dash all of our plans.

When he did speak, I could hardly catch his voice over the sound of the crashing waves.

“Lucius has asked me for the recipe for the explosive I used to destroy the Chantry.”

This was what I had dreaded about Lucius Quintus said in so few words. I had sensed that his motives were not all altruistic, and yet I had allowed myself to be misled with his speech about looking for someone like Anders. And yet, could a man be driven by multiple motives?

No. There was nothing right about his inquiry. One did not ask how to build a very powerful magical explosive out of mere curiosity.

“Did you give it to him?” I wished I hadn’t asked the question even as the words left my mouth.

Anders emitted a heavy sigh. “At first, no. Do you remember the day we met, when he asked me something in Ander? I told him that I wanted to see the recipe die along with the Grand Cleric. He told me that old knowledge always has a way of turning up again, and in time, with experimentation, he’d find it himself. He’s right.” Anders ran a hand through his hair. He did not look at me. He looked every place else but my face. “I get the same sense from him that I once did from an old colleague of mine at the Circle. Ask Wynne about Uldred someday. She’ll tell you about a man that could have used his talent to benefit mages, and instead channeled them into personal gain.”

I focused my gaze on the Amaranthine docks, growing closer and closer as the ship slowed its course. “What do we do?” I whispered. I knew that with time, I could think of an alternative plan, but this news was too fresh, and my mind was chasing itself with far too much free abandon.

“We do what we must.” Now, he looked at me, now with an expression of grim determination, his lips pressed together. “We will continue on our course.”

“And I will continue with you both, I assume,” said Zevran, his voice cheerful as he strode toward us. I noticed that he had armed himself, and carried a small pack slung over his shoulders and chest. “If I might offer a bit of my own knowledge of this fine city, I might know of a man who will rent us a trio of horses, for a small fee, of course.”

“It’s the fastest way to travel,” Anders said grimly, his gaze now on the dockhands scrambling to prepare the docks for our arrival. “To Vigil’s Keep, then.”

And to an uncertain future that lay inside of the Keep, where my brother might be, angry for my betrayal, unforgiving of my choices.

And in the footsteps of a man that had shown himself to be acting for interests that were both uncertain and self-serving.

I had agreed to be a part of all of this. This time, Anders had been honest with me. This time, I was aware that Lucius had interest in the explosive, and now, the recipe. Perhaps he, as a high-ranking politician, would not make such a thing himself, but it did not mean that someone would not make it for him.

Someone like Anders.

This time, I could not feign innocence. People would die, and it would, truly and fully, be my fault.

I think that Anders sensed my unease. He kept casting worried glances in my direction as we disembarked from the ship, moved out from the docks, and into the wide, bustling marketplace.

As we walked past a bookseller’s stall, Anders stopped short, turned toward the table, and picked up a large, wide book. He flipped it open, examined it with a great deal of scrutiny, and offered the seller ten silvers for it. When he paid for it, he turned toward me, extending the book toward me with concern in his gaze.

“Best get started now,” Anders said, a small smile touching his lips as I took the book and opened it.

The pages were filled with illustrations of a goat-man in armor battling what appeared to be comically-drawn darkspawn. However, I didn’t understand a single word of the neatly-printed pages. “This is a child’s book…and it’s in Ander.”

“Rolf the Goat. The first of a series, written when I was a child.” The smile remained as he spoke.

“But…” I looked up, helplessly, at him. “I don’t read a word of Ander. You know that.”

“Sounds like someone is going to teach you.” Zevran wiggled his eyebrows, and grinned. I was certain, in that moment, that I saw him tuck a small purple coin purse into one of his tunic’s pockets, and furthermore, that he hadn’t had the purse before.

“Hey.” Anders looked disappointed. “I was going to say that.”


End file.
